Rumsfeld Support Is in High Places

Despite mounting complaints from U.S. Army officers that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld gave them fewer troops than they wanted for the war in Iraq, he appears to be escaping the kind of criticisms that could imperil his job: sniping from Congress or within the Bush administration.

Rumsfeld won new public endorsements Tuesday from Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Alpine), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

“There is always, during any conflict going back to George Washington, complaints among [the] forces,” Warner said.

Senior administration officials, including some who have privately sniped at Rumsfeld in the past, said they saw no indication that President Bush is losing confidence in the combative secretary of Defense.

“He’s in no trouble,” said one. “It’s much too early. There will be a time for Monday-morning quarterbacking, but it isn’t Monday morning yet.”

Said another Bush advisor: “There’s a strong debate [within the administration] on what to do next, but there’s no inclination to blame Rumsfeld. If he were to get into trouble, it would have to start among Republicans in Congress.”

On Capitol Hill, however, the impulse Tuesday was to circle the wagons and defend the Defense secretary.

“I’m a little surprised by all these reports of criticism from unnamed colonels,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was taken prisoner during the Vietnam War. “In my view, the war is successful so far if you talk about meeting objectives and goals. In the next few days, we’re at a critical juncture, though. If the war gets extended out, I think you’ll see criticism rise. If it goes well, you’ll see it disappear.”

Another Senate Republican said he worried that Rumsfeld’s prickly personality had become a handicap to the war effort.

“He came in as a controversial civilian; now we’re seeing the ramifications of those divisions,” the senator said. “My biggest concern is the confidence of the civilian and military leadership in each other. It’s critical to our success.”

But in a sign of the cautious stance of Republicans, he spoke only on condition he not be identified, and indicated that he was unlikely to criticize Rumsfeld in public.

After U.S. forces met stiffer resistance from Iraqi forces than most military planners expected, senior U.S. Army officials in Iraq and Washington -- some speaking openly, others anonymously -- contended that the invasion force is too small to storm Baghdad while pursuing guerrilla forces in the south and guarding 250-mile-long supply lines. At least 90,000 U.S. troops are believed to be in Iraq.

Rumsfeld “has purposely added unneeded risk to this operation by benching starters from the team,” a senior Army officer at the Pentagon said, speaking on the condition he not be identified. “We are praying for the arrival of both the 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment and especially the 4th Infantry Division to ensure we can win this war if the fight for Baghdad is required.” Those units are en route to the war zone.

Several retired officers, including Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, who led the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division into Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, have made similar accusations. The debate among Army officers burst into public view after the top commander of Army forces now in Iraq, Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, told reporters last week that his troops needed a pause because of Iraqi guerrilla resistance, bad weather and the long supply line.

Rumsfeld and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, vigorously disputed the allegations at a news conference Tuesday.

Myers called the complaints “bogus” and said critics of the plan are “not being responsible members of the team that put this all together.”

“It’s not good for our troops, and it’s not accurate,” he added.

Rumsfeld said that before the invasion was launched, Bush asked all his military commanders: “Do you have everything you need?”

“These are adults,” Rumsfeld said. “They’re all four-stars. And they sat there, and they looked at the president in the eye and said, ‘Absolutely. We’ve got everything we need.’ ”

The Defense secretary acknowledged that some commanders or soldiers in the field may be dissatisfied with the plan.

It is “perfectly possible that some person five layers down is short a meal for a day, or has his communications mixed up with somebody else’s,” he said.

“I don’t think there’s ever been a war where there haven’t been people opining about this or speculating about that or second-guessing on something else,” he said.

It has not been possible to determine whether the criticism within the Army represents a majority of opinion or merely a vocal minority. But it clearly reflects a revival of a larger, long-simmering debate between Rumsfeld and many Army leaders.

Rumsfeld has championed a program of “transformation” of military forces to reduce U.S. dependence on large, heavy armored and infantry units that are the Army’s core. Instead, the Defense secretary has argued that wars of the future will more often be fought by smaller, more lightly armed mobile forces -- of a kind that, to some military officers, appear closer to the Marine Corps’ model.

The debate has drawn the secretary and the Army into a rolling series of clashes -- over budgets, weapon systems, reorganization plans and, now, war plans in Iraq.

“We will win, but at what cost?” asked a senior Army officer, who spoke on the condition he not be identified. “It is not a question of expecting the Pentagon to foresee every change in battle’s fortune. However, there is no excuse to artificially insert risk to prove a budget or transformation point.”

The current plan, he said, “is not about winning, but winning a certain way to prove [Rumsfeld’s] transformation plans.”

McCaffrey, writing in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal, warned: “We are overextended and at risk.”

He said he considers the first phase of the war a success, but believes a much larger force will be needed to press the offensive through to Baghdad. “The ‘rolling start’ concept of the attack dictated by ... Rumsfeld has put us in a temporarily risky position,” he wrote. To preserve tactical surprise despite massing more than 250,000 air, land and sea forces in and around the Persian Gulf over a period of months, Myers said Army Gen. Tommy Franks, the overall commander of the effort, suggested launching a ground war before unleashing the major air campaign -- a tactic that runs counter to much of modern military doctrine.

“Do you think there was tactical surprise?” Myers asked rhetorically. “I think there was.”

Ticking off a list of what he characterized as military successes, Myers said:

“Do we have the oil fields in the south? About 60% of the oil wealth has been preserved for the Iraqi people. You bet. Have we had a Scud fired against Jordan or Israel yet? No. Why? Because we went in very early, even before the ground war, to secure those places. Do we have humanitarian supplies flowing into Umm al Qasr now? Yes. Why? Because we put the ground forces in there early. Were we 200 miles inside Iraq in 36 hours? Yes.”

He said any adjustments to the war plan do not mean it was flawed. It just means the military is “light on our feet,” he said.

A war plan “is like a family budget. It’s something someone sits down and devises, and then never lives with,” Rumsfeld said.

Rumsfeld said that when Bush first gave serious consideration to invading Iraq, a war plan that he described as “old and stale” was “pulled off the shelf.” Officials have said that plan called for a much larger ground force.

“We all agreed that [Franks] should develop a plan that would be more appropriate,” Rumsfeld said. Now, he said, “The war is General Franks’ to fight.”

*

Times staff writers Richard T. Cooper and Janet Hook contributed to this report.