The "Rummie's A Reformer" Myth

It is one of the articles of faith of The Cheerleading Right that Donald Rumsfeld is unpopular with certain Generals entirely because they are dinosaurs who will stop at nothing to sabotage his much-needed overhaul of their top-heavy military apparatus.

And it is nothing but prime bullshit.

William Lindt, the man who wrote the book (literally) on fourth generation warfare and about as rightwing a military expert as you could hope to find, says that Rummie's much-vaunted reorganisation will mean 20% fewer manouver battalions (the ones who do the fighting) and an increase of 11% in headquarters sizes (the ones who don't):

One of the reasons none of America’s armed services has yet transitioned from the Second to the Third Generation is the vast number and size of their headquarters. All those headquarters’ officers are continually looking for something to do, and for some scrap of information that will give them 30 seconds of face time in the endless PowerPoint briefings that are American headquarters’ main business. The result is that they impose endless demands on the time and energy of subordinate units. One Army battalion last year told me they had to submit 64 reports to their division every day.

Here we come to the central question, not only about the Army’s move from divisions to brigades, but about its whole “transformation” program: is it reform, or is it just reorganization? To count as real reform, it needs to move the Army out of the Second Generation and into the Third. If all it amounts to is reorganization within a Second Generation framework, then, frankly, it’s not worth the umpteen-thousand PowerPoint slides it’s printed on.

He also notes in another post how Rummie is encouraging a plague of contractors to descend upon the military:

In Exodus, the Fourth Plague sent upon the Egyptians was a plague of flies. A similar plague of flies has settled on the U.S. military, in the form of a swarm of retired senior officers working as contractors. Not satisfied with their generous pensions, they wheedle six-figure contracts out of senior officer “buddies” still on active duty. In return for steam shovel loads of the taxpayers’ money, they offer “advice” that is, overwhelmingly, flyspeck.

The problem is that these contractors are businessmen, and business is a whore. The goal of business is profit, not truth. Profit requires getting the next contract. Getting the next contract means telling whomever gave you the current contract what he wants to hear. If what he wants to hear isn’t true, so what? Just start the “study” by writing the desired conclusion, then bugger the evidence to fit. The result is endless intellectual corruption, billions of dollars wasted and military services that, as institutions, can no longer think.

The plague of senior officer contractors has effectively pushed those still in the military out of the thought process. Meeting after meeting on issues of doctrine or concepts are dominated by contractors. The officers in the room know that if they wave the BS flag at the contractors, they risk angering the serving senior officers who have given their “buddies” the contract. Junior officers, who have the most direct experience with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, are completely excluded. They have no chance of being heard in meetings dominated by retired generals and colonels.

Not only does contracting out thinking bring intellectual corruption, it adds a whole new layer of dinosaurism to the thought process. Most retired senior officers’ minds froze in the Fulda Gap many years ago, and that remains their vision of war. Further, any change is automatically an attack on their “legacies,” which they are quick to defend. Twenty years ago, once the dinosaur retired, you could push him into the tar pit and move on. Now he is back the next day in a suit, with a six-figure contract.

The plague of contractors reinforces one of the military’s (and other bureaucracies’) worst habits, formalizing thinking. Concepts and doctrine are now developed through layer after layer of formal, structured meetings, invariably organized around PowerPoint briefings. Most attendees are there as representatives of one or another bureaucratic interest, and their job is to defend their turf. PowerPoint briefings not only disguise a lack of intellectual substance with glitzy gimmicks, they inherently work against the concept of Schwerpunkt. Slides usually present umpteen bulletized “points,” all co-equal in (lack of) importance. In the end, what is important is the briefing itself: the medium is the message.

It is interesting to note in this context that the ex-generals who are most critical of Rummie are mainly the ones who most recently did some real warfighting while those who support him are the ones who have been staffers far from the action for a long time. Don't believe me? Google the names yourself. DeLong? He's VP of Shaw Construction now...you know, the ones getting the big moolah from Katrina.