Rumsfeld’s folly

GROUND war is a nitty-gritty, blue-collar occupation, more like plumbing than anything else -- solutions must be improvised when you come up against a wall not in the blueprints. Theories developed in peacetime matter only if they square with wartime facts on the ground. What we find in Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor’s “Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq” is how high-level hubris, incompetent planning and failed theories were balanced on the battlefield by the heroics of the soldiers.

As a combat narrative, it is superb, no doubt owing something to the battlefield expertise of Trainor, a retired Marine lieutenant general. As an insight into this administration’s Defense planning, “Cobra II” exposes for lay readers the reason why Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is loathed by a substantial number of U.S. generals and what may have prompted the recent “generals’ revolt” against him.

“Cobra II” begins with the arrival of the present administration and President Bush’s pledge to transform the military services. Rumsfeld was convinced that new transformational strategies would require wrenching the services (and particularly the Army) out of their supposedly hidebound Cold War doctrines. His approach -- the search for technological silver bullets that would enable smaller, less expensive armed forces to fight faster and less bloody wars -- has been the holy grail of a long line of Defense secretaries.

Rumsfeld and the new administration also believed that the generals and admirals had grown too powerful and had to be brought to heel, an attitude that quickly alienated the military staffs in the Pentagon. Trainor does a credible job of distancing himself from those debates -- though his frustration does break through occasionally. With Defense reforms that enabled the secretary to concentrate routine Pentagon management and detailed military strategy and operations, and with the backing of the president, he lost no time marginalizing the brass -- and, above all, those troublesome Army generals who dealt daily with the realities of ground combat.

Rumsfeld and his supporters, the book shows, were buoyed by initial victories in Afghanistan that seemed, at first blush, to confirm their judgment in using smaller, faster, lighter forces. This led to endless micromanaging of the planning and buildup for the Iraq invasion, and the subsequent insurgency was ignored until it was nearly too late. The Bush administration’s later claim that “we’ve won the war; now we have to win the peace” typified the administration’s cluelessness as the insurgency gathered force.

At the other end of the spear, the troops that carried out the secretary’s plans started the attack in March 2003 unsure of their reception on the other side of the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border. American commanders called the drive into Baghdad “Cobra II,” after Patton’s “Operation Cobra” breakout from the Normandy beaches in World War II -- it was a show of strength that U.S. forces hoped to emulate in Iraq. But as the authors’ painstaking battlefield narrative shows, the troops hesitated after encountering more resistance than planners had anticipated -- no victory parades here -- and then there was a sudden transition to bloody combat.

This part of the authors’ narrative is riveting. Brushing aside the conventional Iraqi units that put up an unenthusiastic defense, they drove into suicidal waves of Fedayeen Saddam militiamen who attacked in pickup trucks and used human shields. The lead units ran into a blizzard of rocket-propelled grenades and dug-in rifle fire. Then blinding sandstorms reduced visibility to a few yards, outfits got lost and resistance stiffened. The drive to Baghdad ground on, but not before Gen. Tommy Franks, Rumsfeld’s pliant commander, threatened to relieve the most forward Army leader because the attack had slowed: Facts on the ground didn’t agree with the general and the secretary’s expectations for a high-speed blitzkrieg.

As March ended and April began, Army and Marine forces battled their way into the city, waiting for the cheers of the liberated populace and for the post-Saddam Hussein local government to resume operation. Of course it never did, the authors relate, because planners had not anticipated that a society so traumatized by years of terror would simply collapse. Meanwhile, die-hard Hussein loyalists helped themselves to arms and munitions left unguarded by stretched-thin coalition forces.

For critical months, as tired combat troops fanned out across the country and the resistance coalesced, a duo of ineffective U.S. proconsuls -- first, retired Gen. Jay Garner, then former Ambassador L. Paul Bremer -- attempted to take hold of a collapsed society. Bremer promptly made matters worse with a series of edicts that made former Baathists ineligible for office -- generally removing anyone with experience in government -- and dissolved the Iraqi military, putting on the street an army’s worth of trained, unpaid and disgruntled soldiers who postwar planning had thought would cooperate in stabilizing their country. The list of pratfalls went on, according to Gordon and Trainor. The U.S. administration in Iraq is presented as inept, composed largely of well-meaning but junior short-termers.

Coordination between political proconsul and military leadership was disjointed at best. The experienced military commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, was replaced, against the wishes of the Army’s leadership, by the most junior and inexperienced three-star in the Army, Ricardo Sanchez, an armored officer from Germany unacquainted with the country, its customs or the situation. Sanchez presided over military mishaps that included the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal and the first failed attack against insurgents in Fallouja. “Cobra II” concludes with the retirement of Franks, who went on the speaking circuit, Rumsfeld’s return to Pentagon transformation theories and the war’s continuing.

A British commander once said that he was saved from the sum of his errors by the industry of his subordinate officers and the dogged devotion of his troops. Bad planning, according to “Cobra II,” is balanced by superb soldiering. As soldiers and Marines closed in on their enemies, theory went out the window in favor of old-fashioned house-to-house, street-to-street slugging -- the tragedies and abandon of frontline war. Gordon and Trainor cast a cool and analytical eye on the snafus that are part and parcel of this combat.

Blood is the cost of experience in war, but once the price is paid, the troops become battle-wise and hardened. The book also captures the wonderful informality of frontline troops and their casual deadliness (“Hey, pilot dude!” is how some infantry patrol members hail a rescued pilot). Combat forces are thin on the ground, both from the paucity of ground forces overall, and because they are inevitably charged with other missions not foreseen in Rumsfeld’s vision of high-tech, just-enough armies. (Three years after the secretary’s refusal to consider expanding U.S. ground forces, infantry companies at the tip of the spear in Iraq are at two-thirds strength, the missing third having gone to train the Iraqi army because there is no one else to do it.)

The jury is still out on whether dogged devotion can redeem the chances lost, the opportunities passed up; Gordon and Trainor maintain, for the most part, a professional reserve until their epilogue. MacArthur’s disaster in Korea in the winter of 1950 was answered by Truman’s decisive action, which included firing the storied general, installing new battlefield leadership and trimming U.S. objectives. There has been no such top-level shake-up in Iraq, though gradually, effective mid-level leaders and strategies have begun to fall into place.

Inevitably, the Pentagon has returned to business as usual, but it is worth noting that the president, in defending his secretary of Defense against recent criticism, praised Rumsfeld for transforming the services -- not for his abilities as a war leader. As the original assault troops buckle up for new rotations in Iraq, Rumsfeld and his subordinates continue the transformation of America’s war machine, assuming -- one surmises -- that next time the facts on the ground will fit their theories. *