Tom Donnelly’s critique of President Bush as a wartime commander is as succinct a compilation of nearsighted conventional wisdom as one can find anywhere. Particularly as his essay pertains to the state of the nation’s defenses, and in his assessment of Bush’s transformation initiatives as shaped and implemented by former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, you’d have to go to the editorial pages of the New York Times or perhaps even Salon.com to find the same caliber of insight.
What makes Donnelly’s analysis of President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld as national-security leaders so unsatisfactory is its one-dimensional concentration on what happened in Iraq. As the focus of judgment draws back over time, it will become more apparent that Bush and Rumsfeld defined the strategic landscape, quite apart from how well they did in Iraq. Indeed, they may be the first leaders who came to office during peacetime intending to transform the nation’s security capabilities, without realizing that their intention would become their imperative, upon which would depend success in a war not in the distant future but in their own time.
As a candidate for election, George W. Bush, in a September 1999 speech at The Citadel, laid out an almost prophetic assessment of the world he would face and the force he wanted to create to deal with it. Given what has taken place in the decade since, his words sound commonplace now. But Bush made his remarks at a time when the attention of the public and the body politic had been seized by Social Security lockboxes, blue dresses, and irrational exuberance. The Cold War was over. One intellectual had declared the end of history, and many people believed him.
The governor of Texas was focused on other things. “I know this is a world of hard choices and new tasks. A world of terror and missiles and madmen,” he told the cadets in Charleston. “Now comes our time of testing.”
“My . . . goal is to build America’s defenses on the troubled frontiers of technology and terror. The protection of America itself will assume a high priority in a new century. Once a strategic afterthought, homeland defense has become an urgent duty.”
The speech was no mere laundry list of good intentions; Bush laid out his program: “I will defend the American people against missiles and terror. And I will begin creating the military of the next century.”
Donnelly gives the totality of the Bush/Rumsfeld agenda short shrift. When he strays beyond Iraq, he charges the president with being an “uncertain steward” of the forces he commands. At the core of his argument is the utterly unfounded canard that Secretary Rumsfeld “regarded the Army as the epitome of Cold War irrelevance and planned to reduce its numbers by 15 to 20 percent. His defense transformation was to take the form of a corporate restructuring of the Pentagon, substituting capital for labor.”
In making this claim, Donnelly is at least being consistent. He raised the same specter on September 10, 2001, the very eve of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. On that date, Donnelly published an essay charging that “as recently as six weeks ago, press reports suggested that Rumsfeld might reduce the Army by two active-duty divisions.”
In fact, between Mr. Donnelly’s 2001 and 2008 essays, Army strength increased–at its peak, by some 40 percent. Under wartime presidential authority, the active Army grew to as many as 700,000 troops (give or take), from the pre-Bush/Rumsfeld level of fewer than 500,000. And while there was and continues to be a debate about whether to make those increases permanent, Donnelly seems unwilling to go beyond atmospherics and consider what has actually happened since 2001.
Of the Afghanistan campaign that year, he writes, “The image of special-operations forces on horseback, calling in satellite-guided bombs, remains seductive.” He seems not to realize that this image presaged a Rumsfeld program of dramatic increases in the size of U.S. special forces, their ascendance as a premier war-fighting command, the appointment of a former special-forces officer as Army chief of staff, and a robust expansion in special forces’ use and lethality.
The criticism of Rumsfeld for supposedly favoring technology over “boots on the ground” misstates his views on the use of force. As a wartime leader, Rumsfeld was neutral on the question of technology. His focus at all times was on capability, and on the most effective means of providing the desired capability at the appropriate time.
Thus, the debate over how large the Army should be was less relevant to him than the question of how capable the Army was to meet current needs. As it happens, the ten-plus standing, non-expeditionary, Cold War-like divisions that President Bush inherited were less appropriate to the needs he faced in an era of asymmetric, expeditionary warfare than the 40-plus enhanced brigades that Rumsfeld and a succession of Army chiefs of staff, including Generals Shinseki, Schoomaker, and Casey, have brought into being over the past eight years.
In deciding how to reorganize the military, Bush and Rumsfeld considered several overarching issues beyond the question of how many soldiers we should have and for what purpose they should be organized. For instance, Rumsfeld’s realignment of America’s global posture, affecting hundreds of thousands of forces, stands as the most significant redeployment of the U.S. military in more than a half-century.
In Korea alone, a succession of presidents and secretaries of defense had failed at what Bush and Rumsfeld accomplished almost without its being noticed: The U.S. presence on the peninsula has been reduced by nearly 30 percent, even as the security and capability of the allied forces have been increased through a combination of stand-off options, much more lethal precision munitions, and a greater assumption of responsibility by the South Koreans themselves.
Closer in, Secretary Rumsfeld and Joint Chiefs chairmen Dick Meyers and Pete Pace totally redesigned our homeland defenses. The old Cold War apparatus, including the venerable NORAD (North American Air Defense Command), has evolved into the United States Northern Command. NorthCom is vastly more capable enterprise designed to coordinate active forces, the reserves, the National Guard, and civilian capabilities in the event of a true crisis inside our own shores.
It is also easy to forget that President Bush inherited a national-security mindset that included the belief that America was safer if it remained undefended against ballistic-missile attack. Adopting that strategy with the Soviet Union, an enemy whose offensive posture was based upon the likelihood of ballistic-missile attack, was like signing a treaty with al-Qaeda not to defend ourselves against the possibility of biological attack.
The president’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 confounded those who believed such an action would precipitate the end of the end of history and start a new Cold War with Russia. Secretary Rumsfeld provided the programmatic leadership and bureaucratic mastery to make the decision stick. He kept the Department of Defense focused on the patient application of success upon modest success in the emerging capabilities of land- and sea-based kinetic-intercept sensor and weapons technology. Today, two years after Rumsfeld’s departure from office, his legacy includes the Pentagon’s methodical improvement and deployment of these capabilities.
Donnelly is right in one thing: Time will tell whether President Bush will be judged a great wartime commander. But that judgment will go well beyond what happens in Baghdad. George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld will also be judged by how well they followed up on candidate Bush’s 1999 promise to “give the Secretary [of Defense] a broad mandate–to challenge the status quo and envision a new architecture of American defense for decades to come.”
For his part, in May 2001, Donnelly offered his own manifesto of sorts. In an essay criticizing the Bush administration for not requesting enough defense spending from Congress (oops . . . since then, the defense budget has nearly tripled), Donnelly challenged Secretary Rumsfeld to an agenda that would be worthy of his tenure: “defending the American homeland, especially against the spreading threat of ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads; fighting and decisively winning multiple large-scale conventional wars; providing a global military presence; and transforming U.S. conventional forces to exploit the ‘revolution in military affairs.’”
There’s really only one answer to the question whether the Bush/Rumsfeld legacy has lived up to this high standard that Donnelly set those many years ago: mission accomplished.
– Lawrence DiRita served in various assignments at the Department of Defense from 2001 to 2006.