thedrifter
11-24-06, 06:54 PM
Sergeant In Iraq Refutes the NYTime Editorial Board
Posted By Blackfive
On the 16th of November, the New York Times wrote a gloating editorial about the elections and the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld. Below is part of the editorial:
The Army We Need
One welcome dividend of Donald Rumsfeld’s departure from the Pentagon is that the United States will now have a chance to rebuild the Army he spent most of his tenure running down.
Mr. Rumsfeld didn’t like the lessons the Army drew from Vietnam — that politicians should not send American troops to fight a war of choice unless they went in with overwhelming force, a clearly defined purpose and strong domestic backing. He didn’t like the Clintonian notion of using the United States military to secure and rebuild broken states.
And when circumstances in Afghanistan and Iraq called for just the things Mr. Rumsfeld didn’t like, he refused to adapt, letting the Army, and American interests, pay the price for his arrogance.
So one of the first challenges for the next defense secretary and the next Congress is to repair, rebuild and reshape the nation’s ground forces. They need to renew the morale and confidence of America’s serving men and women and restore the appeal of career military service for the brightest young officers...
You can read the whole Op-Ed at the NYT.
Sergeant Chris Whitaker is in Iraq and takes issue with the NYTimes selective memory...
Refutation of New York Times Editorial “The Army We Need” dated 19 November 2006
In their editorial entitled The Army We Need, the New York Times editorial staff displays their ignorance of both the nature and history of the United States military both previous to and during the current Administration. In their zeal to portray the outgoing Secretary of Defense, Mr. Donald Rumsfeld, as the architect of the military’s supposed collapse, they neglect a number of facts. These facts show that, contrary to the Times’ editors’ opinions, it is the hangover from the Clinton administration’s Defense inadequacies that has led to the majority of the military’s training and equipment deficiencies.
The rest of Sergeant Whitaker's response is posted after the Jump:
It was during President Clinton’s presidency that the significant drawdown of the defense budget began. From 1992 to 1996, the defense budget was reduced from $339 billion to $277 billion. This slashing of the defense budget was the primary source of the “Peace Dividend” that the Clinton Administration touted as its “budget surplus.” In effect, the Clinton Administration was mortgaging the military’s future to achieve a false “savings.” It is important to understand the nature of military spending in order to truly understand why this drawdown was so destructive to the military the United States found itself with prior to the events of September 11, 2001.
The need for military spending is determined not just by how many soldiers or tanks or airmen or aircraft the military purchases. All these wonderful systems and people require maintenance, training, modernization and replacement. The current generation of systems the military is using was originally purchased during the Reagan military build up of the Cold War. While many of these systems were designed to be updated, there is a limit to how much updating that can be done on a system more than 20 years old. At some point it becomes more expensive to repair and upgrade the weapons system than it does to procure a new, updated system. Given the glacial speed and unpredictable nature of the procurement process, it behooves the military to continually acquire new and improved systems.
The greatest shortfall forced on the military by the Clinton era drawdown was the loss of research and development dollars that lead to the development of new systems. In addition, the loss of those dollars meant that fewer defense dollars were available for the upgrade of current systems and even the procurement of spare parts. Procurement of newer systems was also delayed, as systems tend to be acquired over several years, partly due to costs, but also because complicated systems, like F-22’s, or M-1A3 tanks cannot be bought in bulk as they take a fair amount of lead time to build and the contractor doesn’t exactly keep a bunch of stock sitting around. The funding shortfall is estimated to be upwards of $50 billion. That much money could go a long way towards providing much needed parts, equipment and training. In addition, much of the spending during the Clinton era went towards contingency operations and other readiness shortfalls; it did not pay for the deferred modernization that was has been so desperately.
The article claims that Secretary Rumsfeld refused to adapt, yet adaptation for a new type of conflict and style of engagement is exactly what the former Secretary was trying to achieve. The military had previously been configured for set-piece force-on-force battles with primarily heavy units in areas where maneuver was possible. However, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact there are few, if any, opponents that can even come close to matching the battlefield firepower of the US military. This means that the current force structure is dramatically unsuited to fighting the light, rapid conflicts of the new era. In addition, transitioning the force to a leaner, meaner, and more easily deployable one was the Secretary’s primary aim. It is not the Secretary of Defense that was slow and resistant to change, but the bureaucratic inertia of the United States military. The purpose of this transition was to create a force that used the US’s singular advantages: speed, and the ability to apply overwhelming firepower with pinpoint accuracy, without the need for massive and unwieldy blocks of tanks and armored vehicles. The utter annihilation of the Republican Guard during the second Iraq War is evidence of the gradual evolution towards that end. Overwhelming force does not necessarily require massive numbers of troops and vehicles, which are unwieldy at best, but the author seems to have little awareness of military capability in this regard,
The author also states that Secretary Rumsfeld was opposed to the “...Clintonian notion of using the United States military to secure and rebuild broken states.” Apparently the author is not aware of the purpose of a military. It is not a kind of gigantic Peace Corps that is sent in to fix broken states. The purpose of the military is to defend the nation’s interests and it does that by obliterating the enemy’s ability to threaten those interests. The military is not equipped, trained, or interested in the kind of feel-good, half-hearted nation building of which the author is apparently enamored. In addition, it is apparent that this kind of thing simply does not work, as evidenced by the failure in Bosnia/Herzegovina. Admittedly, much of the failure was one of tactical and strategic failure by politicians, but it is also evidence that the military is ill-suited to the kind of mission the Clinton Administration had in mind. To make things simple, the military is very good at breaking things, but is not trained or designed to put them back together. The author refers to the “…need to renew the morale and confidence of America’s serving men and women…”. As a current service member, currently serving in Iraq, I am not sure of what “morale problem” the author is referring to. The primary morale problem for most service-men and women is the continual uncertainty that the mission will end without completion. In addition, the ridiculously restrictive Rules of Engagement that US forces have to work under wear away at a force that is trained to be aggressive and to take initiative to find, fix, and destroy the enemy. As far as “…restoring the appeal of career military service for the brightest young officers…,” I wonder to what the author is referring. After all, it is those on his side of the argument, along with fools such as Senator Kerry and Representative Murtha, that have denigrated the military profession and attempted to make it an undesirable career for America’s best and brightest. Fortunately their efforts have failed miserably, as the current force, at both the officer and enlisted levels, is the best educated and most capable military force in the history of the profession of arms.
It would be painfully easy to pick apart the rest of the author’s argument, but it would require far more time and space than I am willing to spend. Regardless, it is obvious that the author’s understanding of the working of the military is limited at best and his understanding of the systems the military uses is even more so. Perhaps he should spend a little time with persons from the military, getting a more complete and valid understanding of its workings before offering a prescription based on bias and ignorance that would be even more damaging to the military than his beloved President Clinton ever could.
Ellie
Posted By Blackfive
On the 16th of November, the New York Times wrote a gloating editorial about the elections and the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld. Below is part of the editorial:
The Army We Need
One welcome dividend of Donald Rumsfeld’s departure from the Pentagon is that the United States will now have a chance to rebuild the Army he spent most of his tenure running down.
Mr. Rumsfeld didn’t like the lessons the Army drew from Vietnam — that politicians should not send American troops to fight a war of choice unless they went in with overwhelming force, a clearly defined purpose and strong domestic backing. He didn’t like the Clintonian notion of using the United States military to secure and rebuild broken states.
And when circumstances in Afghanistan and Iraq called for just the things Mr. Rumsfeld didn’t like, he refused to adapt, letting the Army, and American interests, pay the price for his arrogance.
So one of the first challenges for the next defense secretary and the next Congress is to repair, rebuild and reshape the nation’s ground forces. They need to renew the morale and confidence of America’s serving men and women and restore the appeal of career military service for the brightest young officers...
You can read the whole Op-Ed at the NYT.
Sergeant Chris Whitaker is in Iraq and takes issue with the NYTimes selective memory...
Refutation of New York Times Editorial “The Army We Need” dated 19 November 2006
In their editorial entitled The Army We Need, the New York Times editorial staff displays their ignorance of both the nature and history of the United States military both previous to and during the current Administration. In their zeal to portray the outgoing Secretary of Defense, Mr. Donald Rumsfeld, as the architect of the military’s supposed collapse, they neglect a number of facts. These facts show that, contrary to the Times’ editors’ opinions, it is the hangover from the Clinton administration’s Defense inadequacies that has led to the majority of the military’s training and equipment deficiencies.
The rest of Sergeant Whitaker's response is posted after the Jump:
It was during President Clinton’s presidency that the significant drawdown of the defense budget began. From 1992 to 1996, the defense budget was reduced from $339 billion to $277 billion. This slashing of the defense budget was the primary source of the “Peace Dividend” that the Clinton Administration touted as its “budget surplus.” In effect, the Clinton Administration was mortgaging the military’s future to achieve a false “savings.” It is important to understand the nature of military spending in order to truly understand why this drawdown was so destructive to the military the United States found itself with prior to the events of September 11, 2001.
The need for military spending is determined not just by how many soldiers or tanks or airmen or aircraft the military purchases. All these wonderful systems and people require maintenance, training, modernization and replacement. The current generation of systems the military is using was originally purchased during the Reagan military build up of the Cold War. While many of these systems were designed to be updated, there is a limit to how much updating that can be done on a system more than 20 years old. At some point it becomes more expensive to repair and upgrade the weapons system than it does to procure a new, updated system. Given the glacial speed and unpredictable nature of the procurement process, it behooves the military to continually acquire new and improved systems.
The greatest shortfall forced on the military by the Clinton era drawdown was the loss of research and development dollars that lead to the development of new systems. In addition, the loss of those dollars meant that fewer defense dollars were available for the upgrade of current systems and even the procurement of spare parts. Procurement of newer systems was also delayed, as systems tend to be acquired over several years, partly due to costs, but also because complicated systems, like F-22’s, or M-1A3 tanks cannot be bought in bulk as they take a fair amount of lead time to build and the contractor doesn’t exactly keep a bunch of stock sitting around. The funding shortfall is estimated to be upwards of $50 billion. That much money could go a long way towards providing much needed parts, equipment and training. In addition, much of the spending during the Clinton era went towards contingency operations and other readiness shortfalls; it did not pay for the deferred modernization that was has been so desperately.
The article claims that Secretary Rumsfeld refused to adapt, yet adaptation for a new type of conflict and style of engagement is exactly what the former Secretary was trying to achieve. The military had previously been configured for set-piece force-on-force battles with primarily heavy units in areas where maneuver was possible. However, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact there are few, if any, opponents that can even come close to matching the battlefield firepower of the US military. This means that the current force structure is dramatically unsuited to fighting the light, rapid conflicts of the new era. In addition, transitioning the force to a leaner, meaner, and more easily deployable one was the Secretary’s primary aim. It is not the Secretary of Defense that was slow and resistant to change, but the bureaucratic inertia of the United States military. The purpose of this transition was to create a force that used the US’s singular advantages: speed, and the ability to apply overwhelming firepower with pinpoint accuracy, without the need for massive and unwieldy blocks of tanks and armored vehicles. The utter annihilation of the Republican Guard during the second Iraq War is evidence of the gradual evolution towards that end. Overwhelming force does not necessarily require massive numbers of troops and vehicles, which are unwieldy at best, but the author seems to have little awareness of military capability in this regard,
The author also states that Secretary Rumsfeld was opposed to the “...Clintonian notion of using the United States military to secure and rebuild broken states.” Apparently the author is not aware of the purpose of a military. It is not a kind of gigantic Peace Corps that is sent in to fix broken states. The purpose of the military is to defend the nation’s interests and it does that by obliterating the enemy’s ability to threaten those interests. The military is not equipped, trained, or interested in the kind of feel-good, half-hearted nation building of which the author is apparently enamored. In addition, it is apparent that this kind of thing simply does not work, as evidenced by the failure in Bosnia/Herzegovina. Admittedly, much of the failure was one of tactical and strategic failure by politicians, but it is also evidence that the military is ill-suited to the kind of mission the Clinton Administration had in mind. To make things simple, the military is very good at breaking things, but is not trained or designed to put them back together. The author refers to the “…need to renew the morale and confidence of America’s serving men and women…”. As a current service member, currently serving in Iraq, I am not sure of what “morale problem” the author is referring to. The primary morale problem for most service-men and women is the continual uncertainty that the mission will end without completion. In addition, the ridiculously restrictive Rules of Engagement that US forces have to work under wear away at a force that is trained to be aggressive and to take initiative to find, fix, and destroy the enemy. As far as “…restoring the appeal of career military service for the brightest young officers…,” I wonder to what the author is referring. After all, it is those on his side of the argument, along with fools such as Senator Kerry and Representative Murtha, that have denigrated the military profession and attempted to make it an undesirable career for America’s best and brightest. Fortunately their efforts have failed miserably, as the current force, at both the officer and enlisted levels, is the best educated and most capable military force in the history of the profession of arms.
It would be painfully easy to pick apart the rest of the author’s argument, but it would require far more time and space than I am willing to spend. Regardless, it is obvious that the author’s understanding of the working of the military is limited at best and his understanding of the systems the military uses is even more so. Perhaps he should spend a little time with persons from the military, getting a more complete and valid understanding of its workings before offering a prescription based on bias and ignorance that would be even more damaging to the military than his beloved President Clinton ever could.
Ellie