This article casts some doubts on Rumsfeld's tenure. In truth, though I admire the SecDef, as a proponent of landpower I worry about his commitment to the Army. As the saying goes, air superiority is when my soldier is standing on your airfield. But I'm not worried right now about Rumsfeld and the Army. Reality on the ground in Iraq has restrained his early theoretical excesses, I think.
But the mistrust of Brookings leaps up in my when I read this in the article:
Rumsfeld's plans are hardly perfect. He has taken criticism for sending an underequipped, under-trained fighting force to police post-war Iraq[.]
Huh? What? Did I miss something? Is this serious? Can we be talking about the same OIF-1 force that settled in after Baghdad fell? Or was OIF-2 deficient in some way? Well let's look, shall we?
Was 3rd ID underequipped or under-trained?
Was 1 MEF underequipped or under-trained?
How about that high-tech testbed 4th ID?
Perhaps 1st AD?
2nd Light Cavalry Regiment?
Was 3rd ACR an armed mob?
Were the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Air Assault Division mere amateurs?
Perhaps the brigade of the 82nd AB sent was deficient?
Surely then, 173rd AB brigade, which parachuted into northern Iraq was ill-suited to its mission?
All these were OIF-1 forces, some of which were part of the initial invasion that smashed Saddam's twisted legions in record time.
Or maybe the OIF-2 forces that rotated into Iraq to replace the OIF-1 force were crappy?
I mean, we sent the rest of that sorry 82nd AB division. And 1 ID and 1 CAV with a couple ARNG brigades. And a new Stryker brigade. Which of these units was underequipped and under-trained?
The charge is so ridiculous that one strains to remember that the Pentagon was criticized in the summer of 2003 for not getting our troops into soft caps on foot patrols. We forget that many criticized our rotation plan for sending too much heavy armor instead of lighter and more "agile" Humvee-mounted infantry. Ah yes, in the days before the faux armor shortage charges were levied against the military leadership, the Perfectionistas who know all and see all denigrated the heavy nature of the early occupation force.
I have no problem with criticisms of our policies. We make mistakes. We do. And honest criticism is needed to correct errors in order to win. Blind cheerleading does nobody any favors.
But dreck like this comment makes it difficult for me to take some critics seriously. Critics who seem ill-equipped and too poorly trained to opine on serious matters of defense.
