April 1, 2003

By BERNARD WEINRAUB with THOM SHANKER

V CORPS HEADQUARTERS, near the Kuwait-Iraq border, March 31

- Long-simmering tensions between Defense Secretary Donald

H. Rumsfeld and Army commanders have erupted in a series of

complaints from officers on the Iraqi battlefield that the

Pentagon has not sent enough troops to wage the war as they

want to fight it.

Here today, raw nerves were obvious as officers compared

Mr. Rumsfeld to Robert S. McNamara, an architect of the

Vietnam War who failed to grasp the political and military

realities of Vietnam.

One colonel, who spoke on the condition that his name be

withheld, was among the officers criticizing decisions to

limit initial deployments of troops to the region. "He

wanted to fight this war on the cheap," the colonel said.

"He got what he wanted."

The angry remarks from the battlefield opened with comments

made last Thursday - and widely publicized Friday - by Lt.

Gen. William S. Wallace, the V Corps commander, who said

the military faced the likelihood of a longer war than many

strategists had anticipated.

The comments echo the tension in the bumpy relationship

between Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army

chief of staff.

Underlying the strains between Mr. Rumsfeld and the Army,

which began at the beginning of Mr. Rumsfeld's tenure, are

questions that challenge not only the Rumsfeld design for

this war but also his broader approach to transforming the

military.

The first is why, in an era when American military

dominance comes in both the quality of its technology and

of its troops, the defense secretary prefers emphasizing

long-range precision weapons to putting boots on the

ground.

At present, there are about 100,000 coalition troops inside

Iraq, part of more than 300,000 on land, at sea and in the

air throughout the region for the war. Just under 100,000

more troops stand ready for possible deployment.

Even after the war, some experts argue that it could take

several hundred thousand troops to hold and control a

country the size of California, with about 24 million

people.

Mr. Rumsfeld has argued that he adopted this approach for

flowing forces to the region to prepare for war without

upsetting the Bush administration's diplomatic efforts.

The idea was to raise pressure on Iraq until President Bush

made a decision on whether or not to go to war, Mr.

Rumsfeld has said.

Even some of Mr. Rumsfeld's advisers now acknowledge that

they misjudged the scope and intensity of resistance from

Iraqi paramilitaries in the south, and forced commanders to

divert troops already stretched thin to protect supply

convoys and root out Hussein loyalists in Basra, Nasiriya

and Najaf. But they also point to the air campaign's

successes in the past few days in significantly weakening

the Republican Guard divisions around Baghdad. As one

senior official said of the process that produced the war

plan, as well as the pace and sequencing of troops, "It was

a painful process to match the political and military

goals."

One Army officer said General Wallace's comments -

particularly that "the enemy we're fighting is different

from the one we war-gamed against" - were not meant to show

defiance but merely express a view widely shared among

American officers in Iraq, at headquarters units in

neighboring Kuwait and back at the Pentagon. Some members

of General Wallace's staff have expressed concerns for the

professional future of their boss.

Mr. Rumsfeld arrived at the Pentagon vowing to transform

the military, and senior aides promised to push aside what

they described as hidebound volumes of doctrine in order to

create an armed force emphasizing combat by long-range,

precision strikes and expanding the most maneuverable

military assets, mostly ships, jets, drones, satellites and

Special Operations troops.

Many in the Army thought the defense secretary had declared

war on them, which struck them as unfair, because the Army

had invested as much brainpower as any other service in

transforming itself - perhaps because it had to, since the

Air Force, Navy and Marines were already more nimble.

In certain ways, the dissonance between Mr. Rumsfeld and

General Shinseki is surprising, because the general was

himself the leading advocate of reforming and modernizing

the Army. In October 1999, General Shinseki pledged to

reshape the service from waging war by slog and slash,

calling for new theory and proposing new weapons to create

a land force more agile and precise in bringing lethal

force to the battlefield.

"On the substantive issues, Shinseki and Rumsfeld share a

large agenda, about making the Army more deployable," said

Michael O'Hanlon, senior fellow at the Brookings

Institution. "Shinseki was one of the first guys out of the

block with the concept, and it fit the world view Rumsfeld

brought to the Pentagon when he came in later.

"But their chemistry was just not great," Mr. O'Hanlon

said.

But after he became defense secretary with the new Bush

administration in January 2001, Mr. Rumsfeld made the word

transformation his own and his vision of a more flexible

and agile military often seemed to come at the expense of

General Shinseki's Army.

For example, in an effort to find money for an arsenal of

new, high-technology weapons, some of Mr. Rumsfeld's senior

advisers proposed cutting 2 of the Army's 10 active

divisions; it is still not known how seriously Mr. Rumsfeld

considered the case, but the divisions survived.

Today, the war plan for Iraq was viewed by many in the

service as diminishing the Army role, because it placed a

premium on speed and shock and called for fewer ground

forces to be in place when the war began, planning to call

in more only in case of battlefield surprises and setbacks.

But that takes time.

The Pentagon spokeswoman, Victoria Clarke, said today that

Mr. Rumsfeld did not craft the war plan for Iraq with any

intent to reward or punish an individual armed service, and

instead sees "a mix of services and capabilities they

offer." The war plan, she said, received "a careful review

and approval by all the chiefs."

"As we have made very clear, the secretary does share the

vision of a 21st-century Army that faces the unconventional

threats of today with new and transforming capabilities,"

Ms. Clarke said. "The secretary has worked hard with the

Army to make those sorts of critical changes as quickly as

possible."

But what pushed General Shinseki afoul of the civilian

leadership before this war began were his comments on the

levels of force that might be needed to stabilize Iraq

after the battles were over.

Pressed by Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is

the ranking minority member of the Senate Armed Services

Committee, General Shinseki, who commanded the NATO

peacekeeping force in Bosnia, said several hundred thousand

troops could be needed.

"Wildly off the mark," was how Paul D. Wolfowitz, the

deputy defense secretary, dismissed the Army chief's

comments. Mr. Rumsfeld was a bit more circumspect in his

criticism, saying that the general had a right to his

opinion, but that this one would be proven wrong. Their

public comments were unusual and were widely interpreted in

Washington as a rebuke to General Shinseki, who is

scheduled to retire in mid-June.

William L. Nash, a retired Army major general and veteran

of the first gulf war and the Bosnia mission, said of

General Shinseki, "He is as fine a soldier as I've ever

served with, and his key characteristics are loyalty, and

professional competence."

General Nash, currently a senior fellow at the Council on

Foreign Relations, added, "It is extremely unfortunate that

he has not had more influence on the war planning and the

allocation of forces."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/01/international/worldspecial/01PENT.html?ex=1050235855&ei=1&en=a2ec0a644b6b2654

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