Hackworth is Hacking

I generally like articles by David Hackworth, but this one raised my hackles. Maybe I haven't been bothering to read him lately, but he seems to be stuck in a quagmire.

America would be a whole lot safer if the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, was flying for Virgin Airlines, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was competing on "Survivor." Both war leaders have done so miserable a job honchoing the military side of our critical conflict against global terrorism, and in the process so jeopardized our national security, that they should be sacked for dereliction of duty.

Oh, does Hackworth think we'd be better off with Clinton, Albreight and company?

Contrary to continuing political spin, Iraq and Afghanistan both are running sores with little promise of even a long-term turnaround, and our world today is far more dangerous than it was before 9/11. Unless there's a 180-degree change in overall strategy, the USA is doomed to follow the same bloody path through these two brutal killing fields that the Soviet Union took in Afghanistan.

They're running sores with little promise for a turnaround? I would think a pair of democracies that respect human rights is quite a shift from a radical and brutal theocracy and a National socialist genocidal tyranny, but maybe I'm just being picky. And excuse me if I've missed those extra skyscrapers hitting the ground, but prior to 9/11 the world was so dangerous we got 9/11. Meanwhile Saddam was as happy taking pot shots at our aircraft patroling the no-fly zones as Chirac was taking kickbacks, Libya was secretly working on their Manhattan project, probably in more ways than one, and Iran and North Korea continued their own nuclear programs, completely out of sight and out of mind of the powers that be. So now he thinks we're following the same bloody path as the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, so he must be channelling the leftist press that predicted we'd have 200,000 or so casualties if we dared venture into that rocky country.

The mighty sword that Rumsfeld and Myers inherited four years ago - the finest military force in the world - is now chipped and dulled. And the word is that it will take at least a decade to get our overextended, bone-tired soldiers and Marines and their worn-out gear back in shape.

What color is the sky on his planet? Actually, they inherited a military that had just gone through massive cuts, so before complaining that our 650 combat deaths has "broken" it, perhaps he should look at the 500,000 soldiers that Clinton slashed, as reported by the Heritage Foundation in 2000.

Between 1992 and 2000, the Clinton administration cut national defense by more than 500,000 personnel and $50 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars, notes defense policy analyst Jack Spencer. A just-released Congressional Budget Office report finds that military funding would need to increase by $50 billion a year simply to maintain the size of today’s forces.

Since 1992, Spencer notes, the Army has lost four active divisions and two reserve divisions—30 percent of its staff. The Air Force is down by five tactical squadrons, 178 bombers and 30 percent of its active personnel. The naval fleet has gone from 393 ships in 1992 to 316, and the Navy has decreased its active duty personnel by 30 percent. Even the Marines have lost personnel—22,000 since 1992.

Despite this drastic downsizing, the pace of military deployments has increased 16-fold over the last eight years, including missions in Somalia (1993), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1996), and Iraq and Kuwait (1998). As a result of this over-extension, all four services—Air Force, Army, Marines and Navy—face a shortage of modernized equipment and low morale that is driving more and more troops out of the military completely.

So despite the fact that the military budget has dramatically jumped to try and recover from the Clinton years, in order to fight the war on terror, and despite the fact that the services have more people trying to join up than they can accept, Hackworth makes up a wild story about our troops having to recover for a decade.

Top generals like former NATO commander Wes Clark and a squad of retired and active-duty four-stars warned long before the invasion of Iraq: Don't go there. It doesn't involve our national security. It's not the main objective in our war with international terrorism. Even retired four-star Colin Powell said that if we go to Iraq and break the china, we own it. But know-it-all Rumsfeld and go-along-to-get-along Myers totally ignored this sound military advice.

And Wes Clark was also the moron who ordered soldiers to take an airport just to beat the Russians to it, which would've had profoundly bad foreign policy repercussions that would resonate even to this day, if other officers hadn't had the good sense to refuse the order. He was also having photo-ops with Serbian Gen. Ratko Mladic, against all advice, where they exchanging hats, which is about like partying with Goering. But this is still a step up from letting his Abrams tanks be used for domestic law enforcement at Waco. His campaigned for President merely convinced people that he had more qualifications for narcissistic personality disorder than actual leadership skills.

Before the invasion of Iraq, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, a distinguished soldier with counter-guerrilla campaigns in Vietnam and Bosnia under his pistol belt, was asked by Congress how many soldiers he thought would be needed for the occupation phase in Iraq. His response: A minimum of 200,000.

Well, he also said "several hundred thousand" and the Pentagon disputed his figures, arguing that the US requirements would be closer to the range of a hundred thousand. Since that's what we generally used and we're still there, with the new government taking shape, I'd say the Pentagon was closer to the mark. One administration official said his statement was "bullshit from a Clintonite enamoured of using the army for peacekeeping and not winning wars". Since then General Shinseki was appointed to the board of BancWest in Hawaii, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of BNP Paribas, previously called the Banque Nationale de Paris. Yes, the bank that was getting all that UN Oil for Food money in what's being called the largest financial scandal in world history. It makes me wonder why the French want him on the board, but at least he's not flying for Virgin Airlines or competing on "Survivor".

Rumsfeld treated this courageous soldier - who left half a foot in the Vietnam Delta - like a leper for telling a truth that was obviously contrary to party lockstep. And Shinseki's spot-on troop estimate was discredited and ridiculed by senior Pentagon chicken hawks like Paul Wolfowitz, a man who dodged the draft during Vietnam and wouldn't know a tank from a Toyota.

Wolfowitz might not know a tank from a Toyota, but our problem during April was to avoid pissing off the populace by leveling their cities. Al-Sadr's "massive uprising" crumpled under the weight of just the 1st Armored Division, which only lost 25 soldiers putting down the revolt. The worst-case scenario of a simultaneous Shia and Sunni upset only cost us 200 troops, and even the height of casualties in April was only half the death rate of the best single month in five continuous years of fighting in Vietnam, so having an extra 200,000 or so troops on hand would've been the height of overkill. Extra convoy protection probably would've helped more than anything, but if we had two or three times the troops we'd have to be running two or three times the number of supply convoys. You can't simultaneously be mixed in with 20 million locals and not have vulnerabilities somewhere, and the military works to reduce those to the greatest extent possible. And as any business executive knows, just thowing more and more men to handle the same task that was already being handled is the surest route to bankruptcy.

Even though Rumsfeld and Myers know zilch about ground fighting in an insurgent environment, they were convinced "Shock 'n' Awe" would do the trick, just as another military dilettante, former SecDef Robert McNamara, believed the big hammer would win in Vietnam, a war where the USA dropped three times the bomb tonnage and used twice the artillery firepower than was used in all of World War II.

"Shock and Awe" had nothing to do with fighting the now defunct "insurgents" nor the trickle of terrorists and dead-enders. It had everything to do with toppling Saddam, who was run out of town and found hiding out in a septic pit. I'd say that was "Shocked and Awed".

Space doesn't allow for the long laundry list of what went wrong after the Iraqi army was predictably defeated by a brilliant "Wham, Bam, Goodbye Saddam" air-and-ground attack and the present occupation phase kicked off. But the key screw-ups are:

• Our ground units went in far too light. They didn't have - and still don't have - sufficiently trained numbers and the right force mix to cope with the growing mess on the ground.

But wait, based on casualty figures the mess on the ground is dramatically shrinking, not growing. Let's have a look at the numbers. US military fatalities were 135 in April, 80 in May, and 42 for June. Whatever the mess that's growing, it's certainly not showing up in casualty rates.

• There wasn't an effective plan to deal with the looting, rioting and civil disorder or the early insurgent attacks. Army and Marine skippers in Iraq from company to division tried to put out four-alarm fires without sufficient force, equipment and logistics. Crisis management prevailed.

Oh, excuse us for invading a country without having sufficient riot control. Are we talking about a war or not? Wouldn't WW-II been much harder if we had to fly C-47's full of smoke jumpers and firefighters behind each bomber formation?

• Iraqi police, civil-defense corps, the regular army and border-patrol units - which could have prevented much of the chaos and civil disobedience that followed - were precipitously disbanded.

Well that would be because they were full of Ba'athists, and we hadn't exactly won them over, since we been shooting them up from Kuwait to Tikrit. Now can anyone name an invasion where the invader kept the enemy's army intact? Bueller? Anyone?

In this column on April 1, 2003, when many Americans and all the White House and Pentagon war hawks were gloating about the easy victory in Iraq, I wrote: "Hopefully ... he (G.W. Bush) won't make the mistake of another Texas president who didn't sack his SecDef and Joint Chiefs chairman straight away for their screw-ups" (See "Stuck in the Quicksand," DefenseWatch, Apr. 1, 2003).

Quagmire, quagmire, quagmire. Let's take a look at his April 2 column. My favorite section is this overblown piece of hyperventilating hooey.

Now we're stuck in the Iraqi quicksand in a soon-to-be burning desert with guerrillas tearing up our rear, doing unto our troops whatever unconventional fighters did to the French at Moscow, the Germans at Stalingrad, the Americans in Vietnam and Somalia, the Soviets in Afghanistan and the Russians in Chechnya.

So were we like the French at the gates of Moscow, leaving a trail of hundreds of thousands of dead in our retreat back to Kuwait? Did we get surrounded and decimated in Baghdad like the Germans did at Stalingrad, with our commander forced to surrender our army to the Ba'athists? Did we end up leaving with over fifty-thousand dead, and helicopters evacuating people from the rooftops? Did we pull out after a single grisly firefight? Did we lose 25,000 soldiers like the Soviets in Afghanistan, or did we lose 128? It seems that his comparison is off by a factor of 200, so maybe he should recheck something.

While Saddam was watching videotapes of “Apocalypse Now” and “Black Hawk Down” and taking notes, Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers – badly misjudging Iraq's determination – chose to refight Desert Storm.

Has Hackworth had a nervous breakdown, or is he claiming that Saddam Hussein, the stupidest military commander in modern history, is actually a super-genius, while the US military is staffed by blithering idiots who happen to crush said super-genius in a couple weeks with fewer casualties than we used to suffer taking some small random pacific island?

The Dream Team made three classic mistakes:

* Not understanding the enemy or the nature of the war.

Darn. I guess we're lucky we found Iraq on a map. At this point I'm forced to wonder if Hack understands the nature of reality?

* Thinking smart bombs would do the job.

I guess all that massive convoy was rolling north due to a clerical error, eh?

* Underestimating the patriotism of the average Saddam-hating Iraqi and how fiercely he'd fight for his country.

It would seem Hack regards them as fierce, when in fact the stiffest resistance we encountered was and is from foreign nut jobs. But let's get back to his current article.

Fox's Brit Hume publicly ridiculed my analysis, much like Wolfowitz did Shinseki's. I wonder if Hume and Wolfowitz like their crow served hot or cold.

Looks like Hack has put himself in the position of not only getting ridicule heaped upon him, but now having to route for America's defeat. I wonder if he's shopping for a French villa?

Our president says he's not big on reading newspapers. But perhaps former librarian Laura will share this column with her husband and suggest he follow Harry Truman's example of firing his inept SecDef when the Korean War was going badly.

Maybe Laura will share this column just to give him a good laugh, because if this were like Korea we'd have 33,000 dead and now sit stalemated south of Baghdad, manning a DMZ. I think I'll ignore Hackworth from now on, because he's lost his senses and is barking at the moon like many a dazed and vapid journalist.