csua.org/u/bby -> www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-na-milwar11mar11,0,4526900.story
By Mark Mazzetti, Times Staff Writer WASHINGTON The war in Iraq is forcing top Pentagon planners to rethink several key assumptions about the use of military power and has called i nto question the vision set out nearly four years ago that the armed for ces can win wars and keep the peace with small numbers of fast-moving, l ightly armed troops. As the Pentagon begins a comprehensive review that will map the future of America's armed forces, many Defense Department officials are acknowled ging that an intractable Iraqi insurgency they didn't foresee has underm ined the military strategy.
With Defense Secretary Donald H Rumsfeld pushing for a "lighter, more le thal and highly mobile fighting force," the Pentagon scrapped as outdate d the requirement that the US military be large enough to simultaneous ly fight two large-scale wars against massed enemy armies. And it spent little time worrying about how to keep the peace after the shooting stop ped. Something happened on the way to the wars of the future: The Pentagon bec ame bogged down in an old-fashioned, costly and drawn-out war of occupat ion. While the rapid assault on Baghdad in March 2003 went smoothly, it is the bloody two years since that have diverged from the Pentagon's blu eprint. "When people were thinking about regime change, they really weren't think ing about the long-term stabilization and peacekeeping operations.
fellow Andrew Hoehn, who led the Pentagon's last major review in 2001. As the Pentagon begins its assessment, it has 145,000 troops stationed in a country they were supposed to have left months ago. And with tensions rising between Washington and the two other countries labeled by Presid ent Bush as an "axis of evil" Iran and North Korea there is a growin g belief within the military's ranks that the White House's rhetoric abo ut preemptive war is out of sync with the US military's strained resou rces. Some inside the Pentagon criticized senior Bush administration officials for assuming that the war in Iraq would end when US troops toppled Sad dam Hussein's regime and for assuming the US could reduce its troop presence to 30,000 soldiers within six months of Baghdad's fall. "The administration was flat wrong on Iraq because they had blinders on," said a senior Army official who worked on strategic planning at the Pen tagon. "There's now a much greater perception that we need to know what we're signing up for before we get into it." As a consequence, the importance of peacekeeping operations and help from allied militaries ideas that some discounted three years ago as remna nts of the President Clinton era are back in vogue at the Pentagon. Although born out of a blizzard of complex diagrams and flow charts, the Pentagon assessment, known as the Quadrennial Defense Review, or QDR, is not an academic exercise. First undertaken after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the QDR is the p laybook the Pentagon uses to guide decisions such as how big the militar y should be and which big-ticket weapons the Defense Department ought to purchase. The Pentagon's decision in 2001 to scrap the two-war doctrine freed war p lanners from requiring enough heavy armor divisions to simultaneously fi ght two major wars, and allowed the Pentagon to invest in more futuristi c weaponry like a missile defense system. So when we're making decisi ons about where to spend the next dollar, you want everyone clear about which sheet of music we're all singing off of," said Michele Flournoy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Flournoy was one of the lead Pentagon officials on the 1997 review, which embraced the two- war doctrine. The new review, which is just beginning, will not be completed until earl y next year. Last fall, a Pentagon advisory board predicted that the pro tracted stability operations underway in Iraq and Afghanistan were a mod el for the US military's future. The Pentagon has focused too little o n preparing for what happens after major combat operations end, said the Defense Science Board, which advises Rumsfeld. "Some have believed, or hoped, that the technological and conceptual adva nces ... can reduce the time and personnel needed for stabilization and reconstruction," the board said. The Defense Science Board report was commissioned to guide the upcoming Q uadrennial Defense Review studies, and it is part of a growing body of P entagon analysis signaling a shift in Defense Department thinking. Another possible shift has to do with the perception of US allies. With the Army and Marine Corps straining to meet the Pentagon's troop requir ements for Iraq and Afghanistan, the participation of allies has taken o n greater importance. Foreign troops would be necessary for any large-sc ale operation the US military might undertake, planners said, if only to share the post-conflict burdens like those confronting the US milit ary in Iraq. "There are smarter, more efficient ways to do regime change and occupatio n," said one senior civilian official at the Pentagon. "One of those way s is to rely much more on our friends and allies to do the back-end work ." In recent weeks, Bush administration officials have taken a far more conc iliatory tone with some of America's oldest European allies. Whereas Rum sfeld once slighted NATO's western European members referring to them as "old Europe" he poked fun at those comments to win over European mi nisters during a trip to the continent last month. On Thursday, Rumsfeld welcomed French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Mar ie to the Pentagon, praising the cooperation between the nations' milita ries over the years. The Iraq war has also shown the weakness in a strategy created by the Pen tagon in 2003 to help plan major operations. The 10-30-30 construct said that the US military should plan military a ctions to seize the initiative within 10 days of the start of an offensi ve, achieve limited military objectives within 30 days, and be prepared within another 30 days to shift military resources to another area of th e world. Many Pentagon officials fear that the success Iraqi insurgents have had i n preventing a US troop reduction in Iraq could be the new rule, rathe r than the exception. As few enemies choose to fight the US military head-on, they might opt instead to fight protracted rear-guard insurgencies. "I think that the Pentagon realizes by now that 10-30-30 is largely outda ted," said Frank Hoffman of the Marine Corps' Center for Emerging Threat s and Opportunities, a contributor to the Defense Science Board study. " It presumes a model of warfare that we ourselves have made obsolete." Hoffman said no adversary was likely to present US forces with a conven tional threat that can be defeated in 30 days. "Our enemy's metric is protracting conflicts to 3,000 days or more," he s aid.
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