Monthly Archives: November 2004

Iraq – Rumsfeld's War – Interview with John Hamre

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PBS Frontline – As deputy secretary of defense in the mid-to-late 1990s, John Hamre was involved in reconstruction planning for Kosovo and Bosnia. He now is president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an organization that has studied every post-war reconstruction task since World War II. In May 2003 the Pentagon asked him and a CSIS team to go to Iraq and evaluate what the U.S. was facing in the aftermath of the war. In this interview, Hamre describes the range of challenges they saw and talks about whether the transformational concepts being pursued by the military today can handle them. “I think we’re really having to struggle with a new and much more complicated problem. The security dimension is more diffuse and more complex. It doesn’t neatly fit the way we’ve structured this brilliant military of ours.”

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Iraq – Rumsfeld's War – Interview with Douglas Macgregor

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PBS Frontline – A tank commander in Desert Storm and currently a Senior Military Fellow at the Institute of National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, Col. Douglas MacGregor (U.S. Army-Ret.) is a well-known maverick in the military establishment and the author of Breaking the Phalanx, a book on how to reform the Army. Donald Rumsfeld read some of his ideas and as the Pentagon was formulating its war plan, he was invited to consult with military officials. “They brought me in and said: ‘We’re looking at Iraq. The chief of staff of the Army says it will take at least 560,000 troops.’ Well, of course I burst out laughing immediately, because those are more troops than we have in the active component. Secondly, the Iraqi enemy was always so weak. Why would you want that many forces?”

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Iraq – Rumsfeld's War – Interview with Joseph P. Hoar

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PBS Frontline – Gen. Joseph P. Hoar (U.S. Marine Corps-Ret.) was commander of CENTCOM from 1991 to 1994. In the build-up to war in Iraq, he supported from the outside Colin Powell’s reservations about the consequences, joined other military figures to oppose the war plan and more recently to support John Kerry. In this interview, Hoar explains how the concept of military transformation has developed over the years, and why it should be executed cautiously.”We were going to be lighter, faster, and we were going to depend more on technology. That part of it was clear — so far so good,” he tells FRONTLINE. “But I think one of the things that the Iraqi campaign has shown us is that you need to go very slowly when you talk about reducing the size of the armed forces.”
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Geopolitics / United States – The Sources of American Legitimacy

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Foreign Affairs – Throughout its history, the United States has made gaining international legitimacy a top priority of its foreign policy. The 18 months since the launch of the Iraq war, however, have left the country’s hard-earned respect and credibility in tatters. In going to war without a legal basis or the backing of traditional U.S. allies, the Bush administration brazenly undermined Washington’s long-held commitment to international law, its acceptance of consensual decision-making, its reputation for moderation, and its identification with the preservation of peace. The road back will be a long and hard one.

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Iraq – Rumsfeld's War – Interview with Thomas White

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PBS Frontline – Gen. Thomas White (U.S. Army-Ret.) was Secretary of the Army from 2001 until April 2003, when he was fired by Donald Rumsfeld. In this interview, he talks about Rumsfeld’s leadership style and drive to remake the military, the Defense Department’s rigid control in planning for a post-war Iraq, and why he believes the Army is on the brink of being broken. “What we are all worried about is that the manpower situation will come unglued. ??? The Army is people; it’s not weapons or platforms. Somebody once said, ‘A soldier’s not in the Army; they are the Army.'”

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Iraq – Rumsfeld's War – Interview with Paul Van Riper

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PBS Frontline – Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper (U.S. Marine Corps-Ret.) is a veteran of Vietnam and Desert Storm and currently lecturer at the National Defense University. He spoke with FRONTLINE about the lessons learned from those past wars, his bitterness over what has happened in post-war Iraq, and the failures of the Pentagon’s civilian leaders: “We don’t have a leadership that’s involved intellectually,” he says. “They simply want to will their way to this transformation. They don’t want to get involved themselves and help think the way through.” Despite this, Van Riper, a scholar of warfare, is hopeful: “I see inside the United States Army the germs of a second intellectual renaissance that’s approaching these problems. And they’re not caught up in the sloganeering that most of the Joint community’s caught up in. They really are studying.”

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Editorial Note – New Archive Organized by Topic

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I have just added to the Archive page an archive of NOSI, organized by topic. Every article posted to NOSI since July 1, 2004 has a topic assigned to it, and if you wish at any time to see all the recent articles posted on the “Royal Navy” or “Transformation,” etc. — simply go to the Archive page and click on the appropriate topic and you will be shown all the articles on that topic in reverse chronological order.
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Iraq – Rumsfeld's War

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PBS Frontline – An outstanding documentary on the inside story of the war within the Pentagon: Donald Rumsfeld’s battle to assert civilian control and remake the way America fights???all the while conducting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This is the transcript of the show. In future days I’ll be linking to the extensive interviews conducted with each participant in the show. The transcript gives a broad overview of the topic. The interviews give fascinating detail of the conflict with Iraq.
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