Robert D. Kaplan, one of our most thoughtful and enterprising foreign correspondents, has an intriguing article in the Atlantic headlined, “What Rumsfeld Got Right.” He admits that the Rumsfeld legacy is not a good one, as seen in the worsening situation in Iraq and Afghanistan on his watch. But he tries to argue that Rumsfeld wasn’t wrong about everything. “Even before 9/11,” he writes, “Rumsfeld saw a new strategic landscape of manifest uncertainty, of fundamental and catastrophic surprise.” In responding to that changed environment, Rumsfeld moved tens of thousands of troops out of established bases in Europe and Asia. He writes:

Thus, by 2004, the Pentagon unveiled plans to bring home an additional 70,000 troops from those fixed garrisons, even as it moved to expand a network of bare-bones sites in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America to support rotational rather than permanently stationed forces. Such “lily pad” bases would be different from the “Little Americas” of the Cold War: no soldiers’ spouses, no kids, no day-care centers, no dogs, no churches.

He also credits Rumsfeld for trying “to break the lock that individual services still held on area commands (a lock that Goldwater-Nichols was supposed to have prevented) by naming a Navy admiral to run the Army-dominated Southern Command, trying to get an Air Force general to run the Navy-dominated Pacific Command, and so on.” In addition: “Parts of the world were unassigned when Rumsfeld came into office; he assigned them. He created Northern Command for the defense of the continental United States and put Canada and Mexico inside it. He assigned Russia to European Command and Antarctica to Pacific Command. Out of part of European Command, which was responsible for much of Africa, he created Africa Command.”

He also writes that Rumsfeld did a good job of repositioning the U.S. in Asia. For instance: “Rumsfeld also took the lead in revamping the U.S.-Japan military relationship. Japan agreed (among other things) to spend billions of dollars to defend itself against North Korean ballistic missiles, and to host the first nuclear aircraft-carrier strike group to forward-deploy overseas (a notable development for a country neuralgic about nuclear weapons).”

Finally there was Rumsfeld’s signature issue of transformation. Kaplan admits that Rumsfeld’s success in this area was far from complete but argues he should be given credit for some significant accomplishments:

Rumsfeld did press for one of the most significant shifts in Army organization since the Napoleonic era, changing the Army’s central maneuver unit from the division to the brigade combat team. A brigade was only half or a third the size of a division (which could have anywhere from 10,000 to 15,000 soldiers). Its headquarters element was less bureaucratic and less top-heavy with colonels.

The problem with all those achievements, as even Kaplan confesses, is that at best Rumsfeld was half-right. Yes the armed forces needed to be transformed-but not necessarily in the “light and lethal” direction that he emphasized, which left them ill-prepared for long-term counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes, it’s a good idea to make the brigade, rather than the division, the basic unit of maneuver–but the Rumsfeld-era brigades lacked enough combat punch and were a poor substitute for dramatically increasing the overall size of the army. Yes, U.S. troops needed to be repositioned after the end of the Cold War–but putting them in the heart of Texas doesn’t improve their readiness to fight in the Middle East or other likely battlefields and it slights the positive political role that long-term deployments overseas can have. Yes, Rumsfeld was right to shake up traditional service prerogatives–but his interventions were often so heavy-handed that they caused resentment out of all proportion to their potential benefits.

Kaplan is right to point out that Rumsfeld didn’t get everything wrong. Thank goodness. But that’s not likely to be much of a defense in the court of history. After all, Robert McNamara got some things right too–his budgeting processes were still in use at the Pentagon decades after he left office. But his legacy remains tied, correctly, to the major war he oversaw. And that will be Rumsfeld’s fate too. It did not help that the turnaround in Iraq occurred only after Rumsfeld and his chosen generals (Abizaid, Casey) were booted out of office.

Also, although Kaplan does not mention this, Rumsfeld’s record is looking worse all the time because his successor has been so much more effective. Bob Gates has turned out to be a real reformer. He has fired more senior political appointees and military officers than Rumsfeld ever did, instituting a principle of accountability that had been sorely lacking during the Rumsfeld years. And he’s done it without creating the widespread, self-defeating animosity that Rumsfeld engendered. Ralph Peters, who called Rumsfeld our worst secretary of defense, has already anointed Gates as the best. Just as Jimmy Carter looked worse because of Reagan’s success, so too will Rumsfeld look worse from Gates’s success.

del.icio.us

Google

Facebook

This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 2:57 PM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.