On Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and More

What Rumsfeld Got Right – Robert Kaplan, The Atlantic

Rumsfeld, one former Pentagon official told me, saw Iraq’s degraded military as an easy target for our own; its destruction would provide a quick demonstration of American power, as well as get rid of the regional threat that the Iraqi regime constituted. No firm believer in democratic transformation, he probably assumed, as did many other people at the time, that any new regime in Baghdad, even a military one, would be a dramatic improvement, in strategic terms for the US and in human-rights terms for the Iraqis. Rather than a fear of chaos, what is more apparent at this stage is a certain complacency on Rumsfeld’s part. For example, he evidently did not challenge the personnel system’s choice of ground commander in post-invasion Iraq. The Army’s 5th Corps was slated to rotate out of Germany and into Iraq. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the 5th Corps commander, and his staff, despite their service in Bosnia, had done little thinking about counterinsurgency. From that set of circumstances, a long trail of well-documented mistakes followed. In this and other cases, Rumsfeld, who is often accused of micromanaging, did not micromanage enough.

Kaplan on Rumsfeld – Max Boot, Contentions

Robert D. Kaplan, one of our most thoughtful and enterprising foreign correspondents, has an intriguing article in the Atlantic headlined, “What Rumsfeld Got Right.” He admits that the Rumsfeld legacy is not a good one, as seen in the worsening situation in Iraq and Afghanistan on his watch. But he tries to argue that Rumsfeld wasn’t wrong about everything. “Even before 9/11,” he writes, “Rumsfeld saw a new strategic landscape of manifest uncertainty, of fundamental and catastrophic surprise.” In responding to that changed environment, Rumsfeld moved tens of thousands of troops out of established bases in Europe and Asia

A Transformer in Disguise – Thomas Donnelly, Weekly Standard

Donald Rumsfeld’s primary mission when he returned to the Pentagon as secretary of defense in 2001 was to transform the US military to meet the missions of the new century. Today it seems more likely that it is his successor, Robert Gates, who will leave the lasting legacy. It’s not just the high-profile firings – Air Force secretary Michael Wynne and Chief of Staff Michael Moseley recently joined former Army secretary Francis Harvey, CENTCOM chief Admiral William Fallon, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace on the list of senior defense officials Gates has pushed out. Nor is it simply the critical promotions of General David Petraeus to replace Fallon and General Raymond Odierno to take Petraeus’s place in Iraq. What these decisions reflect is Gates’s larger purpose: to make the US military focus on the war they’ve got rather than the war they’d like to have. Though he’s only been in the job for 18 months and will presumably be gone with the rest of the Bush administration next January, Gates has managed to push aside what he calls the “next-war-itis” that metastasized during Rumsfeld’s reign and became almost as intractable a problem as al Qaeda or the Taliban. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When he replaced Rumsfeld after the Republican “thumping” in the 2006 elections, Gates was widely viewed as the man who was going to end the futile fighting in Iraq, slay the neocon dragons, and return a sensible “realism” to the land.

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Donald Rumsfeld – Wikipedia