December 23, 2004, 8:23 a.m.
Rumsfeld’s Baby and the Bathwater
The secretary, the military, and transformation.

By John Hillen

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is under no end of political pressure these days — taking heat from a few Republican senators in addition to those critics he is bound to consider as the usual suspects on both the left and the right. I'd expect that he'd consider this a few mice in the attic compared to Nixon's Tony Soprano-esque order to "dump him" in 1973.

Different critics have distinct complaints about the secretary's leadership, ranging from insensitivity to accountability to downright mismanagement of the post-Saddam Iraq campaign. Some strike a chord, but a recent NRO editorial laid out, most are off the mark. On balance, you want this man in the secretary's chair for at least another year — if not more. Nonetheless, Washington being what it is, things have a curious way of spinning out of control and you never know who will be a political casualty.

This poses a great danger to the important wave of change and reformation that Rumsfeld is pushing in the Pentagon. Many of his critics are lumping the transformation of the military in with their criticism of Secretary Rumsfeld. The failure of the forces in Iraq to immediately tamp down the counter-insurgency has led even some of his defenders to shift blame to "his way of war," i.e. transformation of the military.

While Rumsfeld has solidly identified himself with transformation and broken a good amount of Pentagon china in pursuit of it, this sort of analysis conflates two very separate issues and imperils the critical impetus of change for what is largely a Cold War military. It would be very unfortunate for American security if the transformation baby were to be thrown out with the Iraq strategy bathwater or even Rumsfeld himself.

Many critics, and even supporters of Rumsfeld, confuse transformation with a debate about the size of the armed forces. There are reports ad infintum about the "smaller," more agile force that Rumsfeld is pushing the military to build. More agile, no doubt, but smaller is by no means a precondition to transformation.

Military transformation is about taking a force of tanks, ships, and planes meant to defeat a similarly arrayed Soviet military in Western Europe, in the skies, and on the high seas and make it over into a more agile, lethal, and stealthy force that takes advantage of the quantum advances in information technology and computing over the past quarter century. Rather than rely on a traditional American advantage in sheer industrial mass, transformation means to help create forces and tactics that take advantage of information and technology to create outsized effects with differently arrayed forces. While much of transformation is technologically driven (probably 7 of 10 revolutions in military warfare have been — gunpowder, steam engines, nuclear, etc ), it is about much more than gee-whiz technology. Transformation is the umbrella under which the military can change not only its weapons systems but its basing, recruiting, training, tactics, organization, military education systems, doctrine, and strategy. Technology simply enables much of this change.

There is no better example of this than the campaign in Afghanistan, where only a few bombers dropped precision-guided munitions under the targeting guidance of a handful of U.S. ground troops — and with an extraordinarily outsized effect. With new systems and platforms, or old platforms modified to take advantage of transformation (as the B-52 has been), this conversion allows the military to focus on outputs rather than industrial inputs.

There is an implied relationship of transformation to a smaller force. After all, why send a brigade, fighter squadron, or carrier battle group to do what smaller, more lethal, and more networked forces can do today? And in Afghanistan, many transformation observers took the slim U.S. ground presence as proof that transformation meant the military — in particular the ground forces — could be cut away and replaced by high-tech do-dads and gizmos. Some of the most virulent supporters even suggested that transformation meant the end of close combat with the enemy.

But there were tens of thousands of troops on the ground in Afghanistan — without whom the campaign would have failed no matter how much precision fire the U.S. poured down from above. They just were not American troops. The Northern Alliance and other anti-Taliban tribal forces were the boots on the ground that are always needed — even by a transformed military. Transformation never meant that you do not need ground soldiers or will not face close combat. Even a transformed military will rely in some measure on our teenagers fighting their teenagers in a dark alley or on a mountainside.

In Iraq, for reasons that need not be replayed here, we needed almost exclusively American boots on the ground. Other than some Khurdish units, there ended up being no indigenous or allied forces who could play the role of the Northern Alliance. Rumsfeld's decisions about how many of those American troops to deploy to Iraq were based on the policy choices of his aides and commanders. The "small" numbers of troops in Iraq are not "small" because of the requisite shrinking of the ground forces due to transformation.

In fact, the Army has grown since Rumsfeld took office — from almost 470,000 active duty soldiers in 2000 to just over half a million today. The Marine Corps has grown as well, from 171,000 to over 175,000. Moreover, the pressure of transformation Rumsfeld has exerted on the Army has caused it to reorganize so that it can send more soldiers to the field than before. Theoretically there are even more troops available from the same pool than when the secretary took over the Pentagon. Decades-old personnel-management systems needed to be transformed as well.

Iraq, Afghanistan, the war on terrorism, and other global duties have put tremendous strain on the ground troops of our armed forces, of course. But this is not because of transformation. This is because, as many of us argued through the 1990s, U.S. grand strategy and its many contingencies are more ambitious than the size of the force. The bill for that imbalance is now coming due. It can be managed, of course, by reducing the ambitions and contingencies, growing the force, or attending to the protection of American national interests in different ways.

Transformation has not cut one ground soldier or Marine from the force. In fact, it has freed up more for duty. You may disagree with Secretary Rumsfeld about whether or not there are enough troops in Iraq (I think it is about right), but either way the numbers are a matter of a policy that we've chosen — not because defense transformation forces us to scrimp on soldiers.

When then Governor Bush and his advisers were debating transformation and defense policy in 1999, no one was more forward leaning on all the critical aspects of Pentagon change than the man who became president. When we advisers met to nosh over the details of his speeches and policy, it was Bush who kept pushing to put the revolutionary and entrepreneurial ideas back in the speeches if a heavyweight adviser with long Washington experience had taken them out. No matter when Secretary Rumsfeld chooses to leave, I'd bet that transformation remains a presidential priority and, increasingly, a national necessity.

— John Hillen, a contributing editor at National Review, was a defense-policy adviser to the Bush campaign in 2000.

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