Transforming the Military May Be Elusive Goal for Rumsfeld by Alan B. Nichols Soon after he took office in 2000, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld made the rounds through the Pentagon, announcing a broad plan to transform the military from a Cold War-oriented leviathan into a lean, 21st-century, high-tech strike force. But three years later, this bold announcement has been mired in criticism and ongoing doubts about the Bush administrationís ability and willingness to make over the U.S. military. Many segments of the military have resisted the sweeping changes Rumsfeld has called for. When told that its aircraft carriers needed improvements, the Navy ìwas shaken,î according to an Aug. 14, 2003, article in National Review Online by Jed Babbin. Similarly, the Air Force did not want to hear that its F-22 fighter plane was a Cold War weapon ill suited for 21st-century combat. While the Navy and Air Force groaned, Army dissent had all the subtlety of a drill instructor at boot camp, suggested Babbin, who is also an MSNBC military analyst and a former deputy undersecretary of defense in the first Bush administration. According to Babbin, Rumsfeld walked into the ìTank,î the Pentagonís top-secret meeting room, to meet with Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who in effect told Rumsfeld, ìLet me run things my way, and I will make you look good on the Hill. But forget about transformation.î Rumsfeld in turn fixed him with a Pattonesque stare. For such insubordination, many officers would have been shown the door. But Shinseki wasnít canned because the administration feared that Sen. Daniel Inouye, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, would retaliate by holding up the ballistic missile defense system that President Bush so urgently wanted, according to Babbin. Shinseki is Inouyeís political protÈgÈ and is slated to succeed his mentor when Inouye retires. Is the Bush administration serious about reforming the military? If reform means making hard political choices and not stepping on powerful toes, then the Shinseki episode has left some observers wondering about the willingness to pursue this transformation. ìMr. Rumsfeld has not fired any of the generals embodying the old ways,î said Washington-based national security consultant David Isby. ìNor has he killed any of the major equipment programs,î he added, noting the lone exception: the Crusader, a heavy, cannon-like artillery piece. ìFrom a man Henry Kissinger once described as ëthe most ruthless I ever met,íî Isby continued, ìone would have expected blood in the A Ring [the Pentagonís office-conference area] and discarded prototype weapons littering the Pentagonís parking lots. The confrontation [with the Army] has much of its origin in appearances and attitudes rather than hard realities.î Franklin ìChuckî Spinney, a former Air Force officer and a 34-year civil servant in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, echoed Isbyís sentiments: ìFor all the hype about reform,î he said, ìitís business as usual at the Pentagon.î Change in Thinking Reshaping the military, particularly the Army, to fit 21st-century national security and war objectives is widely regarded as a huge challenge, given its fierce loyalty to a World War II-based structure. Nevertheless, changing a sclerotic culture can be done with forceful civilian leadership, provided the goals and the specific steps to get there are clearly spelled out, said Victor OíReilly, a best-selling spy novelist and a 30-year observer of the U.S. military. OíReilly contends that when it comes to the details, the administration remains frustratingly vague. ìRumsfeld came in with lots of lofty ideas about reforming the military, but he had no clear idea of exactly how he intended to do it,î OíReilly said. ìHe trusted that once he laid out a broad vision to his generals, they would go back to their cubicles and put on their thinking caps. But the military has never been creative. Its authoritarian, hierarchical structure does not promote original thought and initiative. ìTransformation is a mind-set issue. Itís about thinking differently,î OíReilly added. ìIdeas about network-centric forces, space-age weaponry, and bold new battlefield strategies and synergies are all very good, but they donít mean a thing without a change in the culture of the armed forces.î In defense of Rumsfeld, Babbin said, ì9/11 changed everything. Rumsfeld wants to avoid another Pearl Harbor, and he knows the U.S. doesnít have time to evolve its forces slowly. Wars are no longer between nations with equivalent forces. Our adversaries are an elusive, amorphous international network of terrorists and the states that sponsor them. They already possess modern technologies and weapons, and they arenít afraid to use them. Furthermore, they arenít sitting around waiting for the U.S. to adapt.î If the Bush team is proceeding too timidly, itís not for lack of effort, argued John Grady, director of communications for the Association of the United States Army, who pointed out that Rumsfeldís hands are tied by Congress and a one-year appropriations cycle. This cycle can make it difficult to plan effectively when a program you advocate can be curtailed or cut from one year to the next. On the other hand, programs or weapons systems that should be allowed to die are often continued because huge defense contracts mean big bucks for congressional districts that benefit from these contracts. To support a lean, space-age fighting force, Rumsfeld said that the Byzantine military bureaucracy must be streamlined and that the Pentagon should run more like a business. To pursue these goals, the administration introduced the Defense Transformation for the 21st Century Act of 2003 earlier this year. According to Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, the act aims to eliminate what he calls the ìthicket of congressionally mandated restrictions, reporting requirements and associated regulations that afflict the Defense Departmentî in key areas, including hardware development, acquisition and combat training. Joint-force training, seen as an essential component of transformation, is currently carried out on lands and in littoral waters that are subject to environmental regulations. The Defense Transformation Act would roll back some of these restrictions. Rumsfeld also wants a whole set of other restrictions removed to reduce the mountain of costly Pentagon paperwork and better manage the civilian workforce. Critics, however, charge that the proposal would repeal many notification requirements, thereby reducing congressional oversight and public accountability over the Defense Department. Thus far, the act has stalled in committee hearings. Issues of Manpower and Technology Rumsfeld came to office with notions that streamlining U.S. military forces also meant reducing them. He thought technology would allow you to do more with fewer troops. In 1998, the Army took action that seemed consistent with this thinking. The generals eliminated 25 percent of combat troops in heavy divisions without changing the command structure of the Army on the grounds that fewer soldiers within the traditional force structure would be just as effective. Both the brass and the defense secretary seemed to be on the same pageóuntil Afghanistan and Iraq. The Afghanistan campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda involved cavalry-style ground troops and high-tech air attacks that used global positioning system-guided precision bombs to flush enemies out of their caves. The Air Force dropped Daisy Cutter bombs and JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munition) weaponry from high altitudes using target information from Special Operations forces on horseback. Under the massive assault, many members of al Qaeda died, and others fled to neighboring locations. The strategy may have initially appeared to work, but was the campaign transformational in every sense of the word? With al Qaeda still alive and Osama bin Laden at large, critics question whether the strategy did all that it was intended to do. In Iraq, where technology was on an even more dazzling display, the military campaign was run out of a central command headquarters buzzing with computers and large monitors displaying a remarkably detailed picture of the battle space. Electronic sensors, human target locators and satellite imagery supplied the target data. Communications between ground forces and headquarters were conducted via a sophisticated closed-circuit Internet system. Bombers and fighters using satellite- and laser-guided bombs took out structures on the ground without damaging buildings only yards away. The Iraq war saw U.S. coalition forces take Baghdad in only three weeks. The campaign was truly 21st-century, high-tech warfare, but again, with the U.S. death toll in Iraq mounting, critics wonder whether this display was actually reflective of a transformed military. In the run-up and execution of the combat phase of the Iraq war, Rumsfeld was popularly perceived to be at odds with his generals over how many troops would be needed. With the initial success of the war, Rumsfeldís view of more technology and fewer troops seemed to be vindicated. However, members of Congress and military officials are finding themselves again at odds with Rumsfeld as they push for a substantial increase in the nationís military to alleviate the strain imposed by maintaining peace in Iraq. And although Rumsfeld continues to insist that additional troops in Iraq are not necessary, even the secretary may now be having second thoughts as the violence in Iraq continues unabated and American troops die on a daily basis. In the wake of mounting criticism over the administrationís handling of the reconstruction, Rumsfeld sent an October memo to his generals asking a series of questions designed to get the military leadership to rethink the war on terrorism. ìAre we doing enough?î asked Rumsfeld in what many saw as a surprisingly frank assessment of the war on terrorism. The persistent problems in Iraq and the larger war on terrorism may be exposing both an overemphasis on technology-based fighting strategies and a leadership problem in which the human element is left out of the calculus of planning. ìThis approach to transformation is self-defeating,î wrote Army Col. Douglas A. Macgregor, author of ìTransformation Under Fire: Revolutionizing How America Fights,î which advocates switching to smaller, rapidly deployable ìbattle groups.î ìThe Industrial Age quest for a technology that can transform warfare, as the rifled musket and the machine gun are incorrectly thought to have done, diverts attention from the far more important features of modern warfare: strategy, structure and jointness,î Macgregor wrote. ìThe emphasis on expensive modernization programs devised under the last administration to the near exclusion of missionóon hardware at the expense of organization and trainingóis not only misguided but also lethal.î Macgregor, a senior military fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at the National Defense University in Washington, contends that, in absolute numbers, the size of the military presence in Iraq is adequate to secure the peace during reconstruction. The problem is that there are too few combat and security forces in proportion to command and support personnel. But, MacGregor asks, ìIs anyone doing anything about it?î In a piece titled ìWhy Itís Time to Revolutionize the Military,î authors James R. Blaker and Steven J. Nider of the Progressive Policy Institute observed, ìTodayís military is still enmeshed in Cold War-era relationships, hierarchies and planning based on the expectation of massive land warfare. Even with a smart overlay of smart weaponry and lightning-fast communications systems, our military is still built around a Napoleonic force structure Ö more suited to a vast army of foot soldiers sweeping across Europe than a fully wired, fast-moving battle force that can respond to such varied crises as Kosovo, Kuwait and East Timor.î ìThe Army has traditionally been manpower-driven,î added Baker Spring, an analyst with the Heritage Foundation. ìTechnology can make an army more effective, but you still need ground troops to control a territory.î Meanwhile, the administration, emboldened by its ìsuccessesî with military technology in Iraq, appears to be pushing full steam ahead with its vision of speedy arsenal ships armed with stealth and other futuristic weapons and platforms. Arthur K. Cebrowski, director of the Defense Departmentís Office of Force Transformation and a strong advocate of military change, has in numerous speeches and congressional testimony repeatedly referred to the need for the military to ìdownshift from system-level wars Ö to the emerging wars fought largely against groups of individuals.î In his article ìIn the American Way of War,î Cebrowski wrote of forward-deployed warfare featuring ìSpecial Operations forces whose easier insertion and extensive local knowledge will give them greater power than large formations deploying from remote locations.î In the Cebrowski vision of transformation, the U.S. military would still be sent on global hunts to weed out terrorist threats, though not in the form of massive deployments. ìWe morph into a military of super-empowered individuals fighting wars against super-empowered individuals,î he said. ì[We move] the military forward toward an embrace of a more sharply focused global cop role: We increasingly specialize in neutralizing bad people who do bad things.î Alan B. Nichols is a freelance writer in Bethesda, Md.