E-Mail This Article to a Friend Merry Christmas, Mr. Rumsfeld (continued)

KRISTOL’S OP-ED also seeks to ingratiate itself to the masses by deriding Rumsfeld’s riff that "you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." "Actually," says Kristol, "we have a pretty terrific Army." Actually, we don’t. This reality is no slight to the men and women serving, but to those tasked with conceiving and executing how they’re trained and equipped — the province of congressional irresponsibility and long-standing parochial Pentagon thinking. The pseudo-experts, ideologues, and technocrats extend beyond Rumsfeld to include the likes of Kristol, Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, and a host of other uniformed visionaries-in-their-own-minds who can’t be bothered with making sure that soldiers are not just properly equipped, but properly trained and led.

It’s hard to have a "pretty terrific Army" without enough junior officers, much less well-trained ones. Between 1995 and 2001, the number of Army captains leaving the service doubled. Part of the reason for this ongoing exodus has been the Army’s unwillingness to reform a personnel system that emphasizes careerism over actual leadership and training. In 2002, for example, a study by the RAND Corporation discovered that the previous 10 years had seen a 50 percent drop in field-training opportunities for young officers; according to a 1999 report by the Government Accountability Office, the training exercises still intact were fatally flawed. In a marginalized 2002 report, even the Army conceded that "junior officers are seldom given opportunities to be innovative in planning training; to make decisions; or to fail, learn, and try again."

Not exactly optimal circumstances for fielding combat-ready young officers. The brainiacs in the Pentagon have only exacerbated matters by a) failing to make changing this a priority (Rumsfeld); b) irresponsibly girding for war with Iraq (Wolfowitz and Feith); and c) ineptly planning for it (Feith), with a), b), and c) all abetted by careerist officers unwilling to buck the system. And with the war in Iraq so popular that the number of people clamoring to do any kind of military service has plummeted (the National Guard was hoping for 55,000 enlistments this year; it got 5000), the increasingly severe shortfalls among young officers are having serious consequences. As the Army Times noted on December 20, new regular-Army lieutenants fresh out of Infantry Officer Basic school are necessarily being assigned to lead National Guard troops deploying to Iraq next year — without going through Ranger or Airborne training, which emphasize the type of combat skills pertinent to fighting in Iraq.

Lieutenants are also being rushed into regular-Army postings without additional training. This isn’t sitting well with many in military circles — particularly Major Donald Vandergriff, a leading defense reformer whose searing critique of the Army’s personnel system did not win him any promotions. It did, however, prompt his superiors to have him evaluate the Army’s personnel initiatives, including reviewing the state of the Army’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps program. (Vandergriff’s findings to date: while the Army’s making some progress, it has a long way to go.) Writing on the current state of officer training and deployment in a recent Army Times op-ed, Vandergriff observes that "during Vietnam, standards in officer accessions (how we prepare individuals to become officers), leader development, promotions and attendance to military and civilian education opportunities were lowered to meet the need for ‘bodies’ or ‘spare parts.’ Despite piles of lessons learned from the mistakes in the personnel arena during Vietnam, we are doing it again."

Vandergriff goes on to discuss "the most frequent complaint" he hears among "the ‘best and brightest’ " lieutenants and captains who are leaving the armed service. They are "fed up," he says, "with being micromanaged to death in a zero-defects, PowerPoint-driven culture that does not give them enough time in the field to learn the arts of soldiering, like troop command and tactical leadership. Even more so, they are fed up and insulted by lowering standards appearing across the ranks — from whom we commission and promote."

Some of Vandergriff’s recommendations for reform (such as the idea that unit commanders should stay with their troops for the duration of combat deployments) have actually been embraced and implemented by Army chief of staff general Peter Schoomaker, who, in Vandergriff’s view, has shown courage in taking on both dubious ideas and entrenched personnel in the Army bureaucracy. While Schoomaker and his staff have not been personally briefed by Vandergriff, a number of senior Army personnel have told Vandergriff and others that Schoomaker holds the maverick major’s work in high esteem and considers it vital in his efforts to better prepare the Army for evolving types of combat.

Vandergriff faced a different valuation when he received a very unexpected order in June 2002 to report to the Office of the Deputy Secretary of Defense, where he would brief Wolfowitz on his work. Upon his arrival — on crutches and in pain, following major surgery — Vandergriff was told that the briefing was off, as Wolfowitz had something more important to attend to.

Vandergriff hasn’t gotten a call from Wolfowitz’s office since. And he’s only merited one mention in the Weekly Standard — which was in 2002.

NEOCONSERVATIVE news editors have not, of course, been alone in attacking Rumsfeld from within the tent. Republican senators John McCain (Arizona), Chuck Hagel (Nebraska), Norm Coleman (Minnesota), Susan Collins (Maine), and Trent Lott (Mississippi) have also inveighed against the defense secretary, openly questioning his fitness for office and expressing an utter lack of confidence in him. While it’s always amusing to observe internecine warfare among Republicans, watching legislators savage Rumsfeld provides little satisfaction, since they helped get us into this mess.

Indeed, if one really wants to glimpse the awful truth about how our elected representatives helped get us into the Iraq war while undermining those sent to fight it, Winslow Wheeler’s The Wastrels of Defense makes for an enlightening read. A veteran Senate Armed Services Committee staffer for 31 years, Wheeler served both Republicans and Democrats. He was forced to resign in 2002 after writing a scathing report detailing how senators from both parties not only added billions of dollars’ worth of "irrelevant and useless projects" for their home states to post-9/11 defense bills, but effectively looted $2.4 billion from Pentagon accounts that fund training, maintenance, spare parts, and all the other things human beings need to fight a war — particularly in ways that minimize casualties.

Earlier this month, Wheeler e-mailed a detailed analysis of the latest Defense Appropriations Act to interested parties; apparently, Congress is still at it, raiding the defense budget to the tune of over $9 billion this year. "Everything Rumsfeld has touched with regard to this war has turned to crap, but it’s only now that Congress is getting all huffy, asking ‘how did this happen’ and ‘who’s responsible for this’ — yet many of those members didn’t stand up and say diddlysquat [at] each step in this misadventure, from pork-barreling to voting for the war, when many of them said they knew better but didn’t have the courage to do what was right," says Wheeler. "Where we are now is not just due to Donald Rumsfeld. It’s because of a failure of many individuals. Systems, institutions, and political parties do not engage in ethical failures. People do."

Jason Vest can be reached at JAV3603@aol.com