Battle Lines Rumsfeld's Push For Speed
Fuels Pentagon Dissent

Billions Are Sought for Force To Fight Blitzkrieg War;
Critics Cite Iraq Troubles Who Will Repair the Sewers? 

GREG JAFFE / Wall Street Journal 16may2005

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is using some controversial lessons gleaned from the invasion of Iraq to buttress his plans to overhaul the U.S. military.

The unprecedented speed of the assault on Baghdad saved countless U.S. lives, Mr. Rumsfeld has often said. An even faster attack with U.S. forces streaming through Turkey could have crushed Saddam Hussein's Baathist leaders before they disappeared, he suggested in a recent Pentagon press conference, and might have prevented the bloody insurgency from taking hold so strongly.

Some Pentagon officials and military officers worry Mr. Rumsfeld has drawn the wrong conclusions from Iraq and is pushing multibillion-dollar solutions to the wrong problems.

"Would getting to Baghdad faster — say by April 1 instead of April 9 — have made a significant difference?" asks retired Col. Mark Cancian in December's U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, a military journal. "Our inability to finish in Iraq arises from our failure to suppress an insurgency, not our slowness in capturing the capital." Col. Cancian, part of a Marine Corps team sent to Iraq to study the war's lessons, today oversees a team of Pentagon analysts that reviews acquisition programs for Mr. Rumsfeld's office.

The contradictory lessons being drawn from the Iraq war have sharpened a debate over military strategy that has been a constant theme at Mr. Rumsfeld's Pentagon. The defense secretary has long pushed the military to recognize that better technology can allow smaller, faster forces to combat conventional foes effectively. He has hit resistance primarily from senior Army and Marine Corps officials — in particular those recently returned from Iraq — who argue that the military's priority ought to be defeating guerrilla fighters, restoring law and order, and rebuilding nations. These are labor-intensive tasks that demand boots on the ground.

The debate matters because it will be a strain for the Pentagon to pay for both a nimble high-tech fighting force capable of blitzkrieg-style attacks and a large stable of soldiers with a deep understanding of local cultures, civil-affairs expertise and language skills. How to balance these competing demands is at the core of a major review of Pentagon spending that kicked off in March and won't wrap up until later this year. (See related article.)

Mr. Rumsfeld has been a firm believer in the power of speed almost from the moment he took office. A few months after the U.S. military's three-week drive to Baghdad in 2003, he made the quest for greater speed official Pentagon policy, rather than just a personal preference.

"Speed has a value all its own," says Ryan Henry, the Pentagon's principal undersecretary for policy. "It allows you to operate when the enemy is off-balance so you can do more with less force." That's especially important these days given the limited public support for protracted conventional wars.

Mr. Rumsfeld's backers in the Pentagon say the U.S. faces a broad array of threats that extend far beyond battling insurgencies. Even as it fights guerrillas in Iraq, the Pentagon also must deal with China's growing military power. A fast, high-tech force is essential if the U.S. military is ever needed to thwart North Korean aggression. Moreover, speed of response is essential given that it's almost impossible to predict what form the next threat will take, or where it will emerge.

"More speed gives you more options," says the Pentagon's Mr. Henry.

Inside the Pentagon, Mr. Rumsfeld's push has been dubbed "10-30-30." According to the military's guidelines, U.S. forces should be able to "seize the initiative" from an enemy, such as halting a North Korean assault on South Korea, in 10 days. In another 30 days, it should be able to "swiftly defeat" the enemy, in this case, by driving North Korean forces back across the border. The U.S. military should be ready to swing to a conflict in another part of the world 30 days later, such as a Chinese assault on Taiwan.

The directive has already led to changes in war plans. In simulated exercises, war planners have found they can't get a heavy ground force to the fight fast enough to meet the new speed goals. Instead, they have begun to rely on air and naval power used in tandem with smaller, faster ground units.

Not all field commanders can meet the new demand for speed, which the Pentagon calls a "stretch goal," a phrase borrowed from management consulting. In such cases, the Army, Navy and Air Force have been asked to come up with new weapons systems to close the gap. They will likely cost hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.

The Navy is creating a new concept called a sea base — as opposed to today's land bases — built around a squadron of five to seven massive ships. The sea bases aim to deliver 12,000 Marines, 430 Humvees and 28 tanks to a battlefield anywhere in the world in just 10 to 14 days compared with four to five weeks currently. In a hypothetical war — say, against Iran — landing craft would deliver ashore about 3,000 to 4,000 Marines each night. Each squadron could cost $15 billion to $20 billion.

A $125 Billion System

New Army vehicles weighing about 20 tons, much lighter than today's 70-ton tanks, would be flown directly into the fight. These vehicles — part of a broader program dubbed the "Future Combat System" — would be guided by information gathered from dozens of surveillance systems, allowing them to avoid close fights and reduce the need for heavy steel protection. The army estimates that its Future Combat System, which consists of 18 different weapons systems built around these light armored vehicles, will cost as much as $125 billion for the first 15 brigades.

The Air Force is spending $5 billion over the next seven years to begin development of a constellation of two dozen satellites dubbed "Space Radar," capable of tracking tens of thousands of vehicles moving along the earth's surface. Currently Space Radar's mission can be performed at far less cost by a plane built around a Boeing 707 frame. But the planes are vulnerable to attack and can't be sent into battle until traditional air defenses have been destroyed.

Most U.S. officers — especially those in the Navy and Air Force — agree with Mr. Rumsfeld that the military can do more with less thanks to technological advances. The defense industry and Congress are also likely to throw their support behind the technologically sophisticated force.

The problem with the speed goals, say military officials who oppose the targets — in particular those in the Army and Marine Corps — is that no sane enemy will challenge the U.S. to a conventional military fight. Rather, they say, enemies will do what they did in Iraq: disperse and try to bleed U.S. forces to death with hit-and-run strikes. In these fights the U.S. has proven itself vulnerable.

To defeat this kind of unconventional enemy, the military must convince the population to turn over insurgents. Soldiers must be able to speak the language, understand the culture and win over locals by making their lives better.

One draft Pentagon proposal recommends new Army counterinsurgency units specializing in construction, policing and the training of indigenous military forces. Some Army officials have even argued for slower attacks, in which U.S. forces stabilize an area before driving forward, as a good way to stop insurgencies.

The high-tech movement "proposes a narrowly conceived force structure based on a narrow definition of warfare," Marine Corps Capt. Timothy Feist wrote in the most recent issue of U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings. "It ignores entire categories of conflict."

Army Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, who oversaw U.S. forces in Baghdad and has a master's degree in public administration, has said in speeches that his troops beat back the insurgency in Baghdad not by winning battles but by ensuring the garbage was picked up and repairing sewer lines in Baghdad slums.

Even in Mr. Rumsfeld's office the 10-30-30 speed goals are controversial. "I hate 10-30-30 because it forces us to get better at the things we are already good at and prevents us from dealing with irregular warfare where we are weak," says one defense official who is helping to direct the spending review under way in the Pentagon.

Cuts in Ship Force

The investment in speed will leave services unprepared for threats posed by terrorist groups, critics argue. For example, the investment in the sea bases' massive ships, which could each cost between $1.4 billion and $3 billion, will likely force the Navy to cut the number of other ships it plans to buy. A few years ago, the Navy envisioned a 375-ship force. Today, officials say they may have to settle for as few as 260 ships. The Navy says it now has 288 deployable ships.

If the Navy is fighting China, that may not matter. But if its mission is searching small boats used for smuggling, it might make a difference. Naval officials say they can use unmanned sensors. But sensors can't do everything humans do.

"You only get that depth of local knowledge from being there, learning the culture and talking with folks," says retired Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski, a Rumsfeld appointee who until recently headed the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation. "You need to build those personal relationships."

The Army's investment in its Future Combat System leaves less money for other areas, such as language training and education. The Pentagon's Defense Science Board, an advisory group that reports to Mr. Rumsfeld, said in a recent report that these programs should represent a "growth industry for the Pentagon and an expensive one."

In December 2004, the U.S. military boasted only 2,864 Arabic speakers, an increase of 11% from the 2,581 it had in 2000, according to the Science Board report. "When I was in Iraq we had to cancel operations simply because we didn't have enough Arabic speakers," says one military officer recently returned from western Iraq. "[It was] the biggest limiting factor on the battlefield."

This year the Army will offer 396 officers the opportunity to get fully funded graduate degrees from U.S. colleges and universities, down from about 7,400 in the late 1970s and early 1980s. About half of the 396 are getting technical degrees so they can work on developing high-tech weapons.

"We are so focused on finding silver bullets that we pour all of our money into technology and underinvest when it comes to developing human power," retired Gen. Mike Carns, a senior member of the Defense Science Board team, said in a recent speech on Capitol Hill.

Mr. Rumsfeld's supporters argue that the education today's officers are getting on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan is far more valuable than a graduate degree. And they warn that optimizing the military to battle low-tech insurgencies could lead to catastrophe if the U.S. were surprised by a higher-tech foe.

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