Will the new Armyleader help or hurtAmerican forces inIraq andAfghanistan?
Bush Changing U.S. Military LeadershipBy Cliff Montgomery – Jan. 29th, 2007The heads of America‘s top military personnel continue to fall, with the recent announcement by new Defense Secretary Robert Gates that Army Gen. George Casey, former commander of all coalition forces in Iraq, will step in to replace departing Army Chief Gen. Peter Schoomaker.”There is no officer at this time better suited to be Army chief of staff,” Gates said as he announced Casey’s new position on Jan. 5th.To be fair, everyone expected Schoomaker to retire; he is nearing the end of a three-year term. But military insiders add the announcement of Schoomaker’s replacement has a deeper meaning. They say it is no less than Gates’ attempt to repair the troubled relationship between the Army and the Pentagon‘s civilian leadership, which reached new heights under the abrasive former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.Rumsfeld came into the Pentagon hell-bent on remaking an American military he viewed as little changed from the Cold War era. He principally aimed his wrecking ball at the Army, which he saw as the biggest dinosaur among the services. Within months, Rumsfeld killed two of the Army’s biggest weapons programs–the Crusader artillery piece and Comanche helicopter–and attempted to cut the active Army down to eight divisions from the existing 10.To top things, there was the well-publicized fallout with then-Army Chief Gen. Eric Shinseki, who successfully fought off Rumsfeld’s attempt to reduce the Army’s numbers, but became Rumsfeld’s enemy by stating publicly, prior to the Iraq war, that occupying Iraq would in fact require hundreds of thousands of troops. Rumsfeld quickly dispatched his own advisers to the talk show mill, countering Shinseki’s analysis.So when Rumsfeld announced Shinseki’s replacement–more than a year before it was due to take effect, by the way–much of the Army brass took it as an unpardonable insult.Instead of selecting from a long list of three- and four-star generals, Rumsfeld brought in the retired Schoomaker to lead the Army. Schoomaker had come from a special operations background, a career track very different from that of traditional Army leaders, who usually rise through the ranks commanding large tank and infantry units.Like Rumsfeld, Schoomaker was seen as a maverick, and shared Rumsfeld’s vision of a lighter, more agile military in which small teams of commandos would play the lead role in the global war against diffuse terrorist networks.”It was a very Rumsfeld kind of thing to bring in Schoomaker to replace Shinseki like he did,” Daniel Goure, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, VA, told Government Executive magazine.Schoomaker’s most lasting legacy is perhaps his push to convert the Army’s principal organizational formation from large divisions, made up of nearly 20,000 soldiers, to smaller brigades of around 3,500 soldiers.Rumsfeld’s Army chief intended the new “modular” brigades to keep a standard formation, so they could more easily replace similar units in distant war zones by falling in on the previous unit’s equipment, which would greatly reduce transportation time and cost.Schoomaker also heavily lobbied Congress for more money to make up for what he described as “a $56 billion equipment shortfall thanks to the procurement holiday of the 1990s,” a burst of traditional Clinton-bashing which the neo-conservatives can’t seem to remove from their systems. They forget that the fall in military spending occurred during their own watch; it was the first President Bush who reasonably began slashing military expenditures, due to the end of the Cold War.Schoomaker though did consistently warn that the Army, stretched in fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, could become a “hollow” force, worn down by constant combat deployments, personnel shortfalls and war-damaged equipment.The new Army chief’s experience commanding troops in Iraq may serve the Army well. Casey should know what’s needed to re-shape forces designed to fight Cold War battles on the plains of Europe to one ready to wage irregular warfare against small guerrilla groups hidden among civilians in urban areas.But his legacy as commander in Iraq remains uncertain, said Goure. Casey was a strong advocate of a smaller footprint for American troops, and pushed to quickly get Americans off Baghdad‘s streets to be replaced by Iraq’s own security forces.The result? When Casey prematurely pulled American troops off Baghdad’s streets in early 2006, the levels of violence in the city skyrocketed.
