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March 6, 2003, 9:00 a.m. General Pols Is the Army chief of staff running for office? By Jed Babbin

uring the Clinton years, the same people who (either privately or publicly) professed to loathe the military also tried to remake it in their own image. Rumors abounded of the White House, and especially the First Lady, heavily influencing general officer promotions to ensure political fealty. Whether those rumors were true or not, the general officer corps did change dramatically.

Many of the generals who were promoted in the Clinton years are ready to retire, and some are now coming out of the closet. Retired Army general Wesley Clark should be any Democrat's dream candidate. Trim and polished, a former Rhodes scholar from Arkansas, Clark seems the model soldier. He is also someone to be taken seriously on national security. A few weeks ago, discussing his non-campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination on Meet the Press, Clark came out strongly against the current president's policies, saying it was unthinkable that he — Clark — would run for anything as a Republican. On the subject of Iraq, Clark went on and on about how the U.N. is the sine qua non of legitimate action. If you closed your eyes, you could have sworn you were listening to Carl Levin. In a way, you were.

General Clark is waiting for a call that won't come in '04, and can't in '08 (assuming Mrs. Clinton is running then). There is still a great distrust of the military within the Democratic party's core groups, enough to bar Clark from the presidential nomination. But it won't stop other retiring generals who seek lesser office. It was inevitable, really: Some who were selected for Democratic loyalty rather than for warmaking skills are now moving into politics. And some who are preparing for retirement, such as Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki, appear to be working against Bush's plan to fight the war on terror.

America's generals serve at the behest of the president, and wars usually bring about changes in commanding generals. Lincoln fired a whole list of McClellans who wouldn't fight — or didn't know how — before he found Grant. Before America entered World War II, FDR brought World War I commander Black Jack Pershing out of retirement to change the peacetime army to a fighting force. Pershing chose George C. Marshall to be the next Army chief of staff, catapulting a warrior-intellectual from one-star to four-star rank overnight. When Marshall took over in 1939, he fired most of the top generals, and drew from the ranks of colonels and one-star generals to find real warriors to put in command. It's fair to ask: If we're really at war, why is the president apparently satisfied with generals who are working to oppose his plan to fight it?

Since Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld took office, the Army has been his most visible opponent. When Rumsfeld first tried to kill the Army's new Crusader artillery system, Army Secretary Thomas White and Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki end-ran Rumsfeld and forced an unusual open battle on Capitol Hill. Crusader — at 90 tons — was too heavy to be deployed in less time than it takes to build a pyramid. It was typical Army old-think. Our Army may be the best the world has seen, but many of its leaders have yet to grasp that an Army that can't get to today's battlefields faster than the enemy can get away isn't going to be much use as a tool of national policy. Rumsfeld won the Crusader battle, but left White and Shinseki there, effectively rewarding their political chicanery. White and Shinseki have been at odds with so much that the administration is trying to do, it's hard to understand why they still have their jobs.

Shinseki is protected by a Democratic senator who may be grooming him to take over his own seat in the Senate in the next few years. Shinseki is not as smooth or attractive a candidate as Wesley Clark, but he may soon be a candidate nonetheless.

During World War II, Shinseki's uncles joined the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which was comprised of Japanese Americans, many of whom enlisted out of the internment camps in which their parents were confined. Shinseki's relatives fought beside young Daniel Inouye, now Hawaii's senior senator. Senator Inouye, as ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, has real power over what the Defense Department and the Army do.

Shinseki, with Inouye's active support, was appointed Army chief of staff in 1999. A West Pointer, Shinseki was wounded in Vietnam. But his only real combat command experience was in Clinton-era "peacekeeping" missions, which have accordingly formed his view of how the Army should work. People who have worked with him describe Shinseki as seeing only two legitimate uses for the Army: in high-profile peacekeeping missions and in all-out wars like World War II, where massed armies square off for battle.

Shinseki's successor as Army chief of staff was announced about a year ago, yet he remains at his desk, almost daring the administration to fire him. Shinseki was opposed to Army involvement in Afghanistan. Now he's publicly questioning the president's policy on Iraq.

As soon as the war began, Shinseki began trying to keep the Army from having to fight it. When the Army was asked what it would take to destroy the terrorists in Afghanistan, Shinseki responded that the entire XVIII Corps — about 50,000 men — would be needed, and would require several months of training, mobilization, and deployment. As a result, the Afghanistan campaign began without the Army. In November 2001, Rumsfeld asked Shinseki what it would take to defeat Iraq. Shinseki assured him it would take a huge number of troops — a number, in fact, that actually exceeded the active-duty strength of the entire Army. Instead of finding ways to support the president's policies, Shinseki has repeatedly resorted to obstruction and delay. Last week, he did something much worse.

On February 25, Shinseki testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Senator Levin asked him to "give us some idea as to the magnitude of the Army's force requirement for an occupation of Iraq…" Any general officer — especially one as political as Shinseki — would have corrected the question before answering it, because the very premise of an extended "occupation" is antithetical to President Bush's policy of liberation. (It also plays right into the hands of opponents in Europe and the Middle East who claim that our real objective is only to occupy Iraq and seize its oil.) Instead of correcting Levin, Shinseki answered that "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" would be required. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were both angered by the response, and the next day Wolfowitz issued a pointed statement noting that Shinseki's estimate was "wildly off the mark." According to one report, Wolfowitz went out of his way to repudiate Shinseki, adding that "Shinseki's prediction came at a delicate time when the Bush administration is trying to piece together a broad-based coalition to support an invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein." And still Shinseki remains.

Inouye is 79 and serving his seventh senate term. Shinseki is set to retire from the Army this June, and may be feathering his Hawaiian political nest already. Shinseki's pet project is a wheeled light-armored vehicle called "Stryker." Shinseki became enamored of wheeled vehicles while serving in those incoherent Clintonian peacekeeping missions. As a result, Stryker — a lightly armored troop carrier — was designed for peacekeeping, not for delivering soldiers to a real fight. Its thin armor and unstabilized gun make it terribly vulnerable. Since it has wheels rather than tracks, it can't go most of the places warriors need it to go. And at about $3 million a copy, Stryker is eating up money the Army badly needs elsewhere — for warfighting, not peacekeeping.

Shinseki is doling out Stryker brigades the way Bob Byrd doles out pork in West Virginia. Should the time come for Shinseki to run for Inouye's Senate seat, he'll be able to claim credit for the $1 billion Stryker brigade to be stationed in Hawaii. Another will be stationed — with equal strategic uselessness — in Alaska, for the benefit of Republican Ted Stevens, chairman of the Appropriations Committee.

Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz already have their hands full with fractious allies and the war itself. Clinton-era hangovers who oppose the president should be asked to resign. And real warriors — and they are out there somewhere — need to be put in charge. This is, after all, a war.

— Jed Babbin, an NRO contributor, was a deputy undersecretary of defense in the first Bush administration. He is the author of the novel, Legacy of Valor, and often appears as a war commentator on the Fox News Channel and MSNBC.