Even right after the brilliant "March to Baghdad" there was some indication Rumsfeld's plan was amiss, as Seymour Hersh told us in a New Yorker article on April 7, 2003:
The battle between Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon
According to a dozen or so military men ... Rumsfeld simply failed to anticipate the consequences of protracted warfare. He put Army and Marine units in the field with few reserves and an insufficient number of tanks and other armored vehicles. ... "All we have now is front-line positions," the former intelligence official told me. "Everything else is missing."
"Hope," a retired four-star general subsequently told me, "is not a course of action."
"This is tragic," one senior planner said bitterly. "American lives are being lost." The former intelligence official told me, "They all said, `We can do it with air power.' They believed their own propaganda." The high-ranking former general described Rumsfeld's approach to the Joint Staff war planning as "McNamara-like intimidation.. "He thought he knew better," one senior planner said. "He was the decision-maker at every turn."
Talking about McNamara, he now says about the Iraq war: "It's Just Wrong What We're Doing"
In an exclusive interview, repentant Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara breaks his silence on Iraq: The United States, he says, is making the same mistakes all over again
Chief among the discoveries that led him to see Vietnam as a mistake, he said, was his realization that the United States could not, by itself, properly analyze the actions and ground-level conditions necessary to achieve the complex and ambiguous goals of a war -- reversing the influence of communism in Asia, in Vietnam's case, or bringing democracy to the Arab world, in Iraq's.
"And the reason I feel that is that we're not omniscient," he said. "And we've demonstrated that in Iraq, I think." He pointed to Washington's failure to appreciate the complexities of Iraqi culture, and therefore to anticipate the extended guerrilla war it is now engaged in -- a chief mistake of Vietnam.
More on Rumsfeld's micromanaging
The former high-ranking general compared the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Stepford wives. "They've abrogated their responsibility."On at least six occasions.. Rumsfeld.. insisted that the number of ground troops be sharply reduced. Rumsfeld's faith in precision bombing and his insistence on streamlined military operations has had profound consequences for the ability of the armed forces to fight effectively overseas. "They've got no resources," a former high-level intelligence official said. "He was so focussed on proving his point--that the Iraqis were going to fall apart."
The critical moment, one planner said, came last fall [2002], during the buildup for the war, when Rumsfeld decided that he would no longer be guided by the Pentagon's most sophisticated war-planning document, the TPFDL... "It's the complete applecart, with many pieces," [says] Roger J. Spiller,.. Professor of military history at the U.S. Command ..
When [the TPFDL] was initially presented to Rumsfeld [in 2002] it called for the involvement of a wide range of forces .. including four or more Army divisions. Rumsfeld rejected the package, [and] insisted that a smaller, faster-moving attack force, combined with overwhelming air power, would suffice. Rumsfeld further stunned the Joint Staff by insisting that he would control the timing and flow of Army and Marine troops to the combat zone. He, and not the generals, would decide which unit would go when and where
McNamara on Vietnam and Iraq: we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why....
Without the full involvement of other major nations, he said, such mistakes will always be made.
"And if we can't persuade other nations with comparable values and comparable interests of the merit of our course, we should reconsider the course, and very likely change it. And if we'd followed that rule, we wouldn't have been in Vietnam, because there wasn't one single major ally, not France or Britain or Germany or Japan, that agreed with our course or stood beside us there. And we wouldn't be in Iraq."
McNamara's 11 reasons why Vietnam was wrong
We misjudged then -- and we have since -- the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries . . . and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.
We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience. . . . We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.
We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
Our judgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.
We failed then -- and have since -- to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces and doctrine. . . . We failed as well to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement . . . before we initiated the action.
After the action got under way and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course . . . we did not fully explain what was happening and why we were doing what we did.
We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people's or country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action . . . should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.
We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions. . . . At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.
Underlying many of these errors lay our failure to organize the top echelons of the executive branch to deal effectively with the extraordinarily complex range of political and military issues.
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SEYMOUR M. HERSH - The battle between Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon.
McNamara: "It's Just Wrong What We're Doing"