Don’t miss this important David Von Drehle/Washington Post article that provides a decent overview of the reorganization of the Defense Department under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld during preparations for the Iraq War. This is an important issue that has been festering since the Reagan Administration and has major domestic and foreign policy implications (previous posts on the issue are here). However, the issue tends to fly somewhat beneath the radar screen for various reasons, not the least of which is the depth of the issue and the overshadowing effect of related issues, such as detainee policy.
Into this mini-vacuum of analysis, Mr. Von Drehle does a good job of framing the issue:
Diving in, he found his marching orders in a speech given by candidate Bush at the Citadel in 1999, calling for a “transformation” of the great but lumbering U.S. military. The Cold War force was built around big foreign bases and heavy weapons “platforms,” such as tank columns and aircraft carriers. With the Cold War over, Bush said, America should use the chance to “skip a generation” of weaponry and tactics to seize the future of warfare ahead of everyone else. A transformed military would be lightly armored, rapidly deployable, invisible to radar, guided by satellites. It would fight with Special Operations troops and futuristic “systems” of weaponry, robots alongside soldiers, all linked by computers. This force would be unmatchable in combat, Bush predicted, but it should not be used for the sort of “nation-building” that characterized Pentagon deployments to Haiti and the Balkans under Clinton.
