« Preparations | Main | Smart Publicity Move »
September 22, 2005
Breaking Things
Jack Kelly at Irish Pennants thinks it's time for Rumsfeld to go:
Rummy must go chiefly because of his management style. He tends to treat subordinates -- including general officers -- as if they were small children. Some of Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" and dressings down were necessary in the beginning, to shock the military out of complacent old ways. But it is disrespectful.Rumsfeld is smarter than almost anyone he encounters. The problem is he is too well aware of this. He is more interested in giving orders than in listening to advice. In this way he reminds me of Douglas MacArthur, a brilliant general so awed by his own brilliance he accomplished less than more modest generals Marshall and Eisenhower.
Rumsfeld shares another failing with MacArthur. MacArthur preferred a staff of sycophantish mediocrities. To the very limited extent he relies on anyone for advice, Rumsfeld relies on a coterie of intellectuals who military experience is zero, and whose management experience isn't much greater.
Rumsfeld manages from crisis to crisis. Subordinates are to drop what they're doing and respond immediately to whatever is his "snowflake" for the day. This is exhausting, bad for morale, and a poor way to develop long range plans.
Mark Safranski at ZenPundit notes something important about the senior military command structure:
Powell's generation of officers also became exceptionally risk-averse to expeditionary missions that smacked of nation-building or counterinsurgency, preferring to be prepared to fight only " Big wars" against Warsaw Pact opponents. Where the previous generation of general officers had presented a can-do face to presidential requests from JFK and LBJ, the new rising corps of generals and admirals struck the pose of Cassandra, warning of impending doom and searching to find the magic number of troops to request to kill any desire of the White House or Congress to intervene anywhere.[snip]
Beyond the brass where the critical decisions are made by men whose formative experiences on the battlefield were almost two generations earlier are the civilian appointees at the DoD, in the White House and on Congressional staffs. Quick to micromanage but loathe to accept responsibility for the actions of field commanders following instructions from Washington, civilians need to accept their role of providing leadership by making( and standing behind) the tough political decisions, setting broad strategic goals and granting sufficient discretion to carry out the policy objectives.
Finally, most of all, civilian leadership must accept the responsibility when things sometimes go wrong, as they inevitably do in battle, instead of leaving low-ranking soldiers and officers twisting in the wind. Properly directed and supported, given realistic and specific objectives, the U.S. military will move heaven and earth to accomplish their mission.
I think Mark points out why it is that Rumsfeld has been — and continues to be — so important. The generals and staff officers that Franks called, in his autobiography, "Title X Motherfuckers" are the ones who are bitterly opposed to Rumsfeld. It is they who argue and complain when changes come, and determinedly resist any attempts to take a fresh look at the system as it is working now.
And it is that part of the system that Rumsfeld most needs to break apart. It is that part of the system that is fundamentally broken. In the long term, the reorganization of the Army into Brigade Units of Action, with divisions acting like corps used to, is less important than the efforts to change the procurement process so that decisions take less than two years to reach the field. This means, actually, cutting out whole layers and columns of bureaucrats — mostly bureaucrats in uniform — and that means that a lot of long-established ways of doing things need to be swept away. That the reasons for those ways of doing things are no longer applicable is not the kind of thinking that bureaucrats are known for doing well.
So I have to disagree with Jack, and say that Rumsfeld should stay. It's precisely because he is making people uncomfortable and shaking things up that he is so necessary. Rumsfeld would not be a good SecDef in an environment where things are working well. But things are not working well in several parts of the Pentagon that do not directly deal with combat in the field, because they are still stuck in a Cold War and static slogging mentality, and Rumsfeld is doing the right things to fix that.
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.caerdroia.org/MT/mt-tb.cgi/471
Comments
Exactly right. Certainly he's disrespectful, but frankly that's exactly what's needed, and he still has much left to accomplish yet. I'm willing to bank on Rumsfeld being remebered as the most important SecDef of the past 40 years. I don't know if you've read Tom Barnett's Esquire piece on him, but it's interesting as well.
Posted by: Matt McIntosh at September 22, 2005 8:51 PM