Pentagon Planning Document Leaves Iraq Out
of Equation
LA Times/The Nation
By Mark Mazzetti, Times Staff Writer
January 24, 2006
WASHINGTON — The U.S. military has long been accused of always
planning to fight its last war. But as the Pentagon assesses threats to
national security over the next four years, a major blueprint being completed
in the shadow of the Iraq war will do largely the opposite.
The military went into Iraq with a vision that a small, agile, and lightly
armored force could win a quick preemptive war. Although the U.S. easily
crushed Saddam Hussein's army, the subsequent occupation has proven far
costlier in lives, money and international standing than most expected.
As a result, the U.S. military has no appetite for another lengthy war of
"regime change."
And while some new lessons will be incorporated into the Pentagon review,
the spending blueprint for the next four years will largely stick to the script
Pentagon officials wrote before the Iraq war, according to those familiar with
the nearly final document that will be presented to Congress in early
February.
Iraq "is clearly a one-off," said a Pentagon official who is working on the
top-to-bottom study, known as the Quadrennial Defense Review. "There is
certainly no intention to do it again."
For more than two years, Army officials have been fending off questions
about whether they have enough troops to complete their mission in Iraq and
racing to get armor plates bolted onto Humvees and supply trucks to defend
against homemade bombs.
But in the Pentagon blueprint, officials are once again talking about a
futuristic force of robots, networked computers and drone aircraft. And they
are planning no significant shift in resources to bulk up ground forces
strained by the lengthy occupation of Iraq.
Regarding the Iraq war as an anomaly is in some ways convenient for Pentagon
civilians and uniformed officers. An armored assault across miles of desert is
hardly the vision that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's civilian team
laid out when it took over the Pentagon five years ago. At the same time, the
human and financial costs of the war have made many senior generals eager to
turn the page on Iraq.
Yet some experts say that failure to draw broader lessons from Iraq is
dangerous, especially if the U.S. military suddenly faces a new war in a hot
spot such as North Korea or Iran that it has no choice but to fight.
"There is a logical disconnect between the lessons learned from Iraq and the
conclusions that we can live with a smaller ground force," said Michele
Flournoy, a defense policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies and a former top Pentagon official.
Members of both parties in Congress have supported a significant expansion
of the Army's ranks, and on Friday a bipartisan group headed by Senate Majority
Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said it intended to fight the Pentagon's plan to
reorganize its combat brigades.
Rumsfeld has long opposed an increase in the size of the military, in part
because of cost. The Pentagon estimates that permanently enlarging the Army by
30,000 troops would cost approximately $3 billion annually.
Instead, the Army made plans to increase the number of combat brigades from
48 to 77 without changing the overall number of soldiers. Dividing forces into
smaller units would give military planners increased flexibility. However, in
recent months they have decided to scale back to 70 brigades.
The Army also expects to gradually thin its active duty ranks over the next
five years from more than 500,000 to a baseline of 482,000 while working to
increase the number of combat forces available for overseas deployments by
converting noncombat jobs into frontline slots.
The Pentagon's last major review in 2001 concluded that the military would
be large enough to simultaneously fight two major wars, and be able to carry
out "regime change" and occupation in one of the two. In light of the Iraq
experience, some in the Pentagon argued last year that this requirement was
unrealistic, and advocated a change for the upcoming document.
But officials say that the requirements for the U.S. military will not be
scaled back or changed drastically when the strategic review is unveiled next
month.
The new blueprint does include some changes. According to Pentagon
officials, it will place a new emphasis on "irregular warfare," typified by the
counterinsurgency battles U.S. soldiers and Marines have fought in Iraq since
the summer of 2003. The Pentagon review will also endorse a large increase in
the number of special operations troops, and more foreign language education
and cultural-awareness training for all U.S. troops.
The Pentagon also plans a new emphasis on peacekeeping operations, which had
been marginalized at the start of the Bush administration. A recently approved
Pentagon directive elevates "stability" operations to a primary mission for the
military, a recognition that the military was ill-prepared for the messy
occupation after the fall of Baghdad.
The number of soldiers needed to fight ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
meet other foreign commitments and ensure that there is a large enough reserve
force to respond to a future crisis has been the subject of intense debate
inside the Pentagon.
Many Pentagon officials say privately that the military's ability to take on
another "major combat operation" besides Iraq in the near future is limited.
While a large force could be assembled for a military operation of short
duration, they say, another open-ended occupation without significant support
from allies would likely break the all-volunteer military.
In addition to keeping an eye on threats throughout the Islamic world, the
Pentagon is also spending billions to hedge against the rising military threat
posed by China. The Pentagon is unable to significantly expand the Army's ranks
in part because it is funding futuristic Air Force and Navy weapons such as the
F/A-22 fighter and the Navy's DDX destroyer, which are primarily geared to
taking on a large force like the Chinese military.
Even with more than 100,000 troops still stationed in Iraq, Army officials
insist publicly that the Iraq war has not limited the Army's ability to respond
to any future crisis.
"We have the capability … to surge to any crisis that the president
may ask us to do," Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey told reporters last week.
"This force structure, we think, is appropriate to the threat."
Last March, then-Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard B. Myers gave a
classified assessment to Congress warning that the strains imposed by the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan made it more difficult for the military to counter a
future act of aggression, launch a preemptive strike or intervene to prevent
conflict in another part of the world.
While Myers' report stated that the military would be able to win any war
the president asked the Pentagon to fight, it said that military was at
"significant risk" of being unable to prevail against enemies abroad in the way
that Pentagon war plans mandate.
As Pentagon officials put it at the time, there would be more civilian
casualties and collateral damage. The military would have to "win uglier," they
said.
Some critics argue the Iraq experience has turned into the antithesis of
Rumsfeld's vision: Instead of moving toward a smaller, lighter force, the
military has for the past two years become bigger and heavier.
"The Iraq war has been a nonstop embarrassment for the people who believe in
military transformation," said Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, a
Virginia-based defense think tank.
"Some of the senior policy makers don't want to believe what they're
watching on their television sets."
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