http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1145235882...e_whats_news_us
Flanking Maneuvers
Rumsfeld's Control
Of Military Policy
Appears to Weaken

Some Officers Quietly Balk
At Ideas Such as Leaner,
More Streamlined Forces
Curbing a New War Handbook
By GREG JAFFE and NEIL KING JR.
April 17, 2006; Page A1

(See Corrections & Amplifications item below.)

WASHINGTON -- Five years ago, when Donald Rumsfeld took over at the Pentagon, he quickly moved to assert greater civilian control over senior military officers. But now, well into the Bush administration's second term, there are signs that his firm grip on the Defense Department is slipping as some uniformed officers increasingly chart their own course.

Well before the recent calls by a half-dozen retired Army and Marine Corps generals for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation, there was an increasing challenge to his ideas about warfare from within the senior officer ranks. It seems likely to persist even assuming Mr. Rumsfeld survives the retired generals' criticism -- which it appears he will, given a recent strongly worded statement of support from President Bush. (See related article.)


There is a long history of tug and pull between the civilian leadership and the military brass in the Pentagon, but the civilian bosses always have the final say. Yesterday, retired Gen. Richard Myers, who recently stepped down as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the relationship between Mr. Rumsfeld and the military functioned as it should, leaving officers latitude to express their opinions.

While there is no sign the military leadership inside the Pentagon is ignoring or defying Mr. Rumsfeld's orders, senior military officials in a number of cases seem more willing to go their own way, even if that means publicly questioning or quietly trying to undo some of Mr. Rumsfeld's initiatives. "Many of his war-fighting concepts are turning out to be impractical. People are walking away from them," said Robert Killebrew, a retired colonel who spent much of his career as a strategist within top commands inside the Army. He described Mr. Rumsfeld as "increasingly a spent force."

Much of the disenchantment grows out of the initial war plan for taking out Saddam Hussein. Officers who are critical now say the strategies Mr. Rumsfeld championed, particularly his focus on faster, streamlined forces to make warfare more efficient, sowed the seeds for some of the problems encountered later.

The areas where senior military officers seem to be exerting more influence run the gamut from basic manpower and military procurement to how the U.S. military interacts with allies and potential adversaries in the Middle East and Asia.

Even before the ink was dry on a big congressionally mandated review of military spending and on the Pentagon budget for next year, some senior military officers were publicly questioning decisions in the two documents. Gen. Michael Hagee, commandant of the Marine Corps, publicly disagreed with the review's conclusion that the Corps, which has 180,000 active-duty troops, should shrink to 175,000 by 2011. That would force it to pare back important specialties it will need in the coming decades, Gen. Hagee recently told reporters and lawmakers. He has formed a study group, led by a two-star general, to determine exactly what would be lost if the Marine Corps shrank to 175,000.

Similarly, a move to scale back the Army National Guard to free up funds to modernize the Army got a chilly reception from senior Guard officials in the Pentagon. Ultimately, 73 senators lined up against the plan and it was rescinded.

At the same time, despite the administration's oft-stated pledge to democratize the Middle East, the military's U.S. Central Command, which oversees troops in the region, has a somewhat different emphasis. Its top priority is to help existing governments in the region beef up their security to provide a "protective shield" against al Qaeda, officers say. In most cases, that means increasing intelligence-sharing with nondemocratic regimes, providing more counterterrorism training and participating in exercises with their militaries. The hope is that once the regimes are more secure, power will slowly devolve to their people.

In the Pacific, senior officers are pushing for more exchanges with the Chinese military, despite contrary urges from Mr. Rumsfeld. Such exchanges were reduced in the early days of the administration, as Mr. Rumsfeld came into office determined to pare military-to-military engagement and get tough with China.

Senior Army and Marine generals also have launched a concerted campaign to try to roll back a strategy known as "effects-based operations," which has caught the favor of Mr. Rumsfeld and was used to draw up the Iraq war plan.

This theory argues that with the careful employment of military power, wars can be conducted more efficiently and with fewer bombing sorties and fewer casualties. Army and Marine Corps officers have argued that when it comes to ground combat, the concept is simplistic. Recently, three-star generals from both the Army and Marines teamed up in an effort to block publication of a handbook on the concept that they feared would be used to drive war planning in the future.

Mr. Rumsfeld still has many staunch defenders in the Pentagon's civilian and military ranks. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Peter Pace, responding to some of the criticism from retired generals, gave the secretary a spirited defense. "Nobody works harder than he does," the Marine general said at a news conference. "He does his homework. He works weekends. He works nights. People can question my judgment or his judgment, but they should never question the dedication, the patriotism and the work ethic of Secretary Rumsfeld."

Larry Di Rita, Mr. Rumsfeld's civilian aide, said he has seen no changes in how Mr. Rumsfeld operates or interacts with the brass. "This is the same Don Rumsfeld I saw from his first day in the Pentagon," Mr. Di Rita said. The perception that some generals have a freer hand may spring from the fact that he handpicked most of the three and four stars currently serving in the military. "They are people he is on the same wavelength with, people he knows and trusts," Mr. Di Rita said.

On Friday, the department emailed a fact sheet to key officials at defense think tanks in Washington noting that the secretary last year met with the four-star service chiefs 110 times. "Senior U.S. military leaders are involved to an unprecedented degree in every decision making process," the document stated.

The scattered calls for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation began in late March when retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who led the initial effort to train Iraqi security forces, chastised Mr. Rumsfeld in an opinion piece in the New York Times for "unrealistic confidence in technology to replace manpower." Other critics quickly followed, among them retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, a former commander of U.S. forces in the Mideast and Central Asia.

Last week, retired Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who served as former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz's senior military aide and was a senior commander on the ground in Iraq, attacked Mr. Rumsfeld over the planning and execution of the Iraq war. "The current administration repeatedly ignored sound military advice. I think the principles of war are fundamental and we violate those at our own peril," he said on PBS's "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer."

Though the criticism revolves around the difficult situation in Iraq, the unease reflects fundamental disagreement about how wars should be fought. Mr. Rumsfeld came into office with a mandate to shift the military from a force designed for the Cold War to one suited to today's unpredictable threats. He railed against inefficiencies in the military. "I have no desire to attack the Pentagon. I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself," he said in a speech one day before the Sept. 11 attacks.

The swift toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Mr. Rumsfeld's no-nonsense briefing style turned him into something of an administration rock star. The Afghan success seemed to ratify his theories of warfare. He became a strong advocate of the idea that the military, particularly ground forces, needed to be lighter and faster. Whereas initial war plans in Iraq called for as many as 500,000 troops, the secretary -- working closely with Gen. Tommy Franks, who has recently defended Mr. Rumsfeld's management -- whittled that to fewer than 150,000.

Much of the planning grew out of the "effects-based operation" strategy that caught Mr. Rumsfeld's attention. The concept argues that through the careful application of military force and diplomacy, wars can be fought more efficiently, with fewer resources and fewer casualties. Instead of trying to annihilate the foe, the goal was to use all aspects of U.S. power to bend the adversary to U.S. will. In Iraq the strategy put a premium on speed to disorient the enemy and precision strikes to knock out its ability to communicate and control forces.

Initially, the strategy seemed to bear fruit in Iraq. Mr. Rumsfeld argued that the speed of the assault by the relatively small U.S. force caught Mr. Hussein by surprise, preventing him from bursting dams or torching oilfields. But as that swift success gave way to looting and an increasingly violent insurgency, officers in the Army and Marines began to question whether technology could in fact transform how wars were fought.

At first, senior officers were reluctant to contradict Mr. Rumsfeld's conclusions. An Army War College study in October 2003 suggested that Iraqi incompetence had more to do with the enemy's collapse than U.S. tech superiority or speed, but the Army, wary of drawing Mr. Rumsfeld's wrath, never released the study.

More recently, active-duty Army and Marine officers have become more outspoken, reflecting the critiques of some retired officers. Senior three-star officers in the Army and Marine Corps formally petitioned the Joint Forces Command -- a key instrument Mr. Rumsfeld has employed in his push to change the military -- not to publish a handbook on effects-based operations that had long been in the works.

"They saw the handbook as an effort to rewrite the way the services make war in the future," said Col. Killebrew, a retired Army strategist who reviewed their objections for the Army. The handbook was recently published, but the Army and Marines were able to insert a section cautioning that the book wasn't formal U.S. military doctrine, giving the services sway to ignore it in their war planning.

Regional commanders also have been given wider latitude to chart their own course. In the Middle East, their focus is more on stability than the democratization that the administration often cites. "All the military can do is help provide a protective shield" that will give governments in the region the breathing room to reform slowly from within, said one senior officer in U.S. Central Command of the strategy outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. In the near term, this officer conceded, that might involve bolstering the position of nondemocratic regimes.

In Asia, the head of the Pacific Command, Adm. William Fallon, has struck a decidedly more understanding tone toward China than has Mr. Rumsfeld. In a speech in Singapore last year, Mr. Rumsfeld questioned China's military buildup, which he said put the "delicate military balance in the region at risk." Several Pentagon strategy papers, including February's massive review of spending, went further, calling China a potential military competitor whose rise necessitates a variety of U.S. counterstrategies, among them procurement of new long-range bombers and other technologies.

Adm. Fallon expressed a far different view to the Senate this month, playing down China's defense acquisitions and saying "the numbers are not yet anywhere near the kinds of numbers that I believe truly threaten this country." In an interview, he said he had no difference of opinion with Mr. Rumsfeld but simply saw China from a more up-close perspective. "At the national level, you have to look at the world and say what out there has the potential to be a problem," he said. Asked if the signs pointed toward any sort of problem, the admiral said, "I think the answer is very clearly, No."

Mr. Di Rita, the Rumsfeld aide, said Mr. Rumsfeld remains very much satisfied with Adm. Fallon's performance.

Despite longstanding skepticism at the Pentagon about the value of military-to-military contacts with China, Adm. Fallon has pushed strongly to expand and deepen such exchanges. He visited Beijing last fall and intends to go again next month. He has sent a contingent of officers to China and hosted two delegations in Honolulu. The Pacific Command is also pushing to begin more-operational collaborations, including a possible joint search and rescue exercise.

Senior Pentagon officials complain that China remains far too guarded in talking to U.S. officers or revealing much of interest about its military, rendering many exchanges of little value. But Adm. Fallon is determined to push ahead, figuring military exchanges are the best way to get a sense of what the other side is thinking. "In the absence of knowledge, one is left to assumptions, and they tend to be right only some of the time," he said.

Write to Greg Jaffe at greg.jaffe@wsj.com and Neil King Jr. at neil.king@wsj.com


Corrections & Amplifications:

Larry Di Rita, an aide to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, said: "This is the same Don Rumsfeld I saw from my first day in the Pentagon." Mr. Di Rita arrived at the Pentagon a few weeks after Mr. Rumsfeld took office in 2001. This article incorrectly quoted Mr. Di Rita as saying: "This is the same Don Rumsfeld I saw from his first day in the Pentagon."