[Airbornelawyer]

Also, for those who may not be aware, Rumsfeld retired from the Naval Reserve in 1989 as a Captain. He went to college on an NROTC scholarship and was a naval aviator on active duty for three years and as a drilling reservist for 18 more. Then 14 years in the Standby Reserve.

Because of his business background and his role in pushing defense reorganization, he is often compared to McNamara by his enemies. But while McNamara spent almost his entire preofessional career as a corporate executive with Ford Motor Company until Kennedy tapped him for SecDef, Rumsfeld has had a diverse career with experience in Congress, the Executive branch, diplomacy and business, much of which was focused on national security. In national security and government affairs, he is one of the most experienced person to have held the job, in the company of Henry Knox, Henry Stimson, William Howard Taft and George C. Marshall (I might add James Monroe, but he was only Secretary of War for 5 months).

As Secretary, Rumsfeld has ruffled a lot of feathers, especially among the uniformed ranks in the Pentagon. His personal style is certainly a factor, but given what the SecDef's job is, ruffling generals' and admirals' feathers is part of the job. What is surprising is not that he has critics, but how unfettered his critics have felt about publicly expressing their criticisms. In some cases, it has almost reached Article 88 levels. I don't know if this is a legacy of the Clinton Administration (both in the contempt it engendered among many soldiers and in its political favoritism in some promotions) or if such things happened before and I am too young to know or remember.

On a few specific issues:

1. The cancellation of the Crusader program: the Army has always been odd man out on the big-ticket high-tech weapons systems so beloved of Beltway bandits and Congressional appropriators. We don't have the big ships and glamorous fighter planes. The Navy gets "Top Gun"; we get "Firebirds". The Crusader was our Joint Strike Fighter or Trident SSBN. In an ideal world the Army would have the Crusaders it needed to replace many more Paladins. But we are not in an ideal world, and when it comes to priorities, SP howitzers aren't at the top of the list.

2. Large conventional forces in general and the Iraq war plan: Much of the McNamara comparisons are due to Rumsfeld's perceived preference for high-tech weapons over boots on the ground. That, and Eisenhower's New Look (hence the critics of GEN Schoomaker's reorganization plans who compare it to the Pentomic Era). On this, I think there is some room for criticism. The Afghanistan model is not going to work everywhere. But the generals who claim vindication over the woes of the Iraq occupation are also revising history a bit. While I can see where TR is coming from, the Iraq war plan attributed to Rumsfeld's whiz kids of an Afghanistan II probably would not have worked. But the Desert Storm redux pushed by GEN Shinseki and others, with 500,000 troops, probably would not have been feasible either, for the reasons outlined by GH and those set forth in GEN Franks' book, most importantly, speed and initiative. Neither a cumbersome set piece conventional battle nor a UW strategy relying heavily on local forces would have guaranteed the kind of speed and shock GEN Franks thought necessary to get inside Saddam's OODA loop - sorry for the cliche - before the Iraqis could employ the unconventional weapons everyone thought they had ready to fire. Obviously, it would have been preferable to have 4ID rolling down from the north to meet 3ID and the 101st at Baghdad, but the diplomatic failure here with Turkey is not one that falls on Rumsfeld's Pentagon or the armed forces, but on Powell's State Department.

3. The occupation: Here Rumsfeld's Pentagon deserves some criticism. There appears to have been the triumph of hope over reason, with insufficient planning for the contingency if the rest of the world didn't provide the necessary manpower. On this point I both agree in part and disagree in part with GH. A better-focused and oriented US force structure would be preferable, but more boots on the ground were needed. The question is, whose boots? The Administration's failure was in not foreseeing how inadequate international contributions would be, especially from countries usually big in multilateral peacekeeping like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (although in terms of combat power the Dutch battalion probably has more punch than a Bangladeshi division would). But the real unforeseen manpower shortfall may have been unforeseeable, 20/20 hindsight notwithstanding, which was the utter collapse of the Iraqi security apparatus. Ambassador Bremer has been criticized for abolishing the Iraqi armed forces and internal security forces, but these units had ceased to exist long before their formal disbandment, with the Ba'athist officer corps all that was left. We found ourselves starting from scratch rebuilding the police and border guards, while having to do entirely too much policing and border patrolling ourselves. The result was a two-fold problem: first, US and coalition forces were wasting too much time retraining Iraqis and conducting basic law enforcement themselves, diverting resources away from more important tasks, and second, the porous borders allowed Syrian and Iranian-backed terrorists and agents to flood into the country. And some of the actual compromises made as a result, such as then-MG Petraeus' use of Sunni Arab tribal militias of dubious loyalty to patrol the Syrian border, rather than Kurdish peshmerga, and the rehabilitation of Ba'athist officers to run the Fallujah Brigade, end up biting us on the ass.

On balance, while quibbling with certain decisions, I think Rumsfeld has done a good job. He has done the most important thing, which is placing the national security interests of the US first and foremost. He has shown leadership and resolve. And, for a SecDef, I am not sure that having lots of people in and around the Pentagon unhappy with you is inherently a bad thing.