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917By its heft, its chronological position at the heart of the Bush Era (Rumsfeld Era 2001-2009?) and its pivotal role, the 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) was to be the principal lever for effecting the ‘transformation’ that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had designated as the definitive Pentagon reform. It was to entail leaving behind once and for all the ways and the mentality of the Cold War and entering into the 21st century in one fell swoop. Rarely, in an affair of this importance, has such an ambitious aspiration been so completely thwarted and brought to naught.
The 2005 QDR was dragged out beyond expectation. The two previous exercises had taken four and five months. This one lasted an entire year. Such unaccustomed protraction was the telltale sign of the battle raging within the process itself and explains its ultimate failure.
At the outset, two clear challenges emerged:
• The first challenge was to reduce the role of and the budgetary weight of the very costly programs inherited from the Cold War (the F-22, the JSF, the US Army’s FCS, the stealth destroyers and the nuclear submarines).
• The second challenge was to put in place the means for the design of new, more agile, more flexible force structure and more adaptable weapon systems and to institute the programs for the development of such systems.
The net outcome is clear: none of these aims was achieved, not even by a long shot. The irrefutable demonstration seems to have been made that the Pentagon is incapable of reform – that it is irreformable; that the bureaucracy itself exercises such power as to render it invincible in the face of any attempt at reform; and lastly – but far from least – that the reformers themselves lack the inspiration – and indeed, the determination – that could make it possible to mount an effective attack. The fortress is impenetrable because its defenses are colossal and because those mounting the attack employ weapons inadequate to the mission.
A Coalition of the ‘Non-Willing’…
A Pentagon source, cited by MI>Jane’s Defense Weekly
The strange thing about this planning exercise is that it had the appearance of being highly ‘counterrevolutionary’ whereas it had been hailed as a revolutionary event. The paradox is that there has been an unexpected alliance between two quintessentially antagonistic forces.
• On the one hand, there is the DoD bureaucracy, and there the attitude was to be expected; the bureaucracy could be counted on to oppose vigorously any initiative billed as revolutionary. The aim of the bureaucracy was to maintain the status quo, especially the major weapon system programs so strongly criticized over the past two years, with developments in Iraq demonstrating the inability of such weapons to adapt to postmodern – ‘Fourth Generation Warfare’ – conflicts and their uselessness in such conflicts; the bureaucracy feels itself particularly threatened today by the budgetary crisis brought about by the massive expenditures for the Iraq war.
[The major weapon system programs, extremely onerous financially and with design parameters based entirely on Cold War paradigms, are heavily reliant on advanced technologies. Changing attitudes toward such weapons are heralded by the shift in opinion by an expert like Ralph Peters, a former US Army colonel close to the Neocons. Peters had written a noted 1996 article in Parameters entitled ‘Constant Conflict’, in which he praised US technological power as the key to domination of turbulent countries and of regions beyond the writ of the US influence. Peters has now authored an article in the Weekly Standard entitled ‘Counterrevolution in Military Affairs’, in which he makes the case for the military effectiveness of the insurrection in Iraq against US technological capabilities: “Not a single item in our trillion-dollar arsenal can compare with the genius of the suicide bomber – the breakthrough weapon of our time. Our intelligence systems cannot locate him, our arsenal cannot deter him, and, all too often, our soldiers cannot stop him before it is too late.”]
• On the other hand – and there’s the rub – the reformers of the Rumsfeld clan finally renounced any plans for in-depth reform and ended up opposing a truly revolutionary 2005 QDR. That was the big surprise in this exercise because it was they who, at the outset, wanted to take advantage of this congressionally mandated process to initiate their fundamental reforms.
Let us examine this aspect more closely.
Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, practically an unofficial spokesman for the Department of Defense and its faithful sounding board, this time hit the nail on the head in his comment on the 2005 QDR. At the same time, he highlights the strange situation in which ‘Rumsfeldian’ advocates of transformation – who had launched the QDR to revolutionize America’s defense posture – found themselves and their intentions betrayed and forsaken by the reality.
On 24 February, Loren Thompson wrote in the Los Angeles Times (perhaps the fact that he was writing for a broad circulation daily with a lay readership freed him from hewing to the party line): “The Iraq war has been a nonstop embarrassment for the people who believe in military transformation. […] Some of the senior policy makers don’t want to believe what they’re watching on their television sets.” Another aspect of the criticism of the ‘Rumsfeldian’ position is articulated by Michele Flournoy, a defense policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former top Pentagon official: “There is a logical disconnect between the lessons learned from Iraq and the conclusion that we can live with a smaller ground force.”
Such comments lead to the observation that the Rumsfeld transformation advocates found themselves in a poor bargaining position to demand revolutionary transformations. The transformations they sought could be readily blocked by the simple evidence that everything which is transpiring in Iraq contradicts their thesis. How can one argue for smaller forces when, according to the US Army’s unofficial estimates, there is a need for at least 150,000 more men in Iraq just to be able to stabilize the situation at the current level of violence? In this sort of bureaucratic negotiation, public pronouncements and political edicts get short shrift – everyone knows that the announced withdrawal of 30,000 to 40,000 troops from Iraq this year is, at best, a political stunt aimed at the 2006 mid-term Congressional elections, a measure which will not be carried out, or, at worst, a measure that will in fact be implemented and risk plunging Iraq into civil war culminating in the country’s partition into three entities – Shia, Sunni and Kurd.
Thus the Rumsfeld camp found themselves hoist by their own petard. For them, the only solution was the uncomfortable alliance with the conservative bureaucracy. Necessity makes strange bedfellows. The upshot: the 2005 QDR is an absolute, unqualified, unmitigated – non-event.
Is the 2005 QDR the death certificate of a great ambition – the fundamental reform sought by the most controversial, but also the most determined, Secretary of Defense the Pentagon has ever known? Rumsfeld’s last years at the Pentagon could well resemble those of Robert Strange McNamara, who came to the job in 1961 with plans for revolutionary reform and who was paralyzed by the war in Vietnam starting in 1966, obliging him to totally abandon his reform plans until he stepped down.
Rumsfeld’s problem – the profound explanation of his defeat – is that his cause, which at the start was so praiseworthy, was soon discredited by factional infighting. Somewhat surprisingly, Rumsfeld seemed to have grasped the new conditions of fourth-generation warfare when he enthusiastically held up a picture of a member of the US Special Forces with light hyper-sophisticated weapons on horseback in Afghanistan: the combination of certain high-technology systems with a rudimentary means of transport adapted to the terrain and to the local situation demonstrating a high degree of adaptability. The enthusiasm turned out to be but a momentary aberration in a situation that offered a sort of comic relief. On Iraq, Rumsfeld showed that he remained inflexible on the initial troop levels, despite the fact that the situation on the ground cried out for radical upward revision. None of these failings came through in the QDR.
Analyst Michael A. Weinstein, of PINR, noted on 15 February that the QDR was built on a strategic void, “[a] void opened up after the unilateralist vision of Washington’s 2002 National Security was discredited by the limitations of US power revealed during the Iraq intervention.” This refusal to take into account the Iraq failure and to draw the compelling lessons undermined Rumsfeld’s position and that of the reformers vis-à-vis the bureaucracy. Rumsfeld’s self-confidence, which in 2001 gave him a formidable vantage point from which to take on the bureaucracy (see his 10 September 2001 speech), four years later, blinded him in his confrontation with that bureaucracy and led him to a compromise that equates to such immobility that it is in fact tantamount to unconditional surrender – to the bureaucracy – by Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld The Reformer – R.I.P.
If we are to put the history of the 2005 QDR in perspective, we have to go back to the weekend of 20-21 November to trace the evolution of a successful maneuver: the ‘hijacking of the QDR’. In the course of that weekend, very senior members of the military services, including certain ones representing the USAF, persuaded Deputy Secretary of Defense England to abandon the idea of a joint USAF-Navy version of the JSF. [As a practical matter, this meant abandonment of the USAF version (the F 35A) and reduction of the program to two versions: the Navy version (F-35C) becoming the USAF/Navy version and the ADAC/V takeoff (F 35B) version.] It was a powerful symbolic act, especially because of the political weight (both national and international), as well as the budgetary weight, that the Joint Strike Fighter Program had acquired. From that point onward, any hope that the QDR might really prove a revolutionary attempt, however tentative, to influence Pentagon programming and, beyond that, to influence the destructive authority of the bureaucracy born of the Cold War, was dashed.
The period in question – November 2005 – is important. At that time, the Bush Administration was being pummeled by various scandals (starting with the indictment and resignation, at the end of October, of I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, Cheney’s right-hand man); the unpopularity of the war in Iraq went off the charts in the polls; the Republican Party was in free-fall and the prospects for the mid-term elections were catastrophic.
Presidential Advisor Karl Rove, having sneaked by without indictment momentarily, but more than ever very much the man in charge at the White House, decided that it was absolutely necessary to divert public attention. To achieve that, there was but one approach: to take the mind of the public off Iraq, it was necessary to get back to the broader theme of the global war against terror. In a way, the QDR exercise fitted in with the Karl Rove strategy, with the QDR becoming a political instrument to serve the needs of the Administration.
On 8 February (in The Guardian), Simon Tysdall commented on the intense mediatization over the preceding days of the expression ‘The Long War’ to describe the ‘War Against Terror’. The term appeared in the notes of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of end January. It appeared most prominently at the top of the introduction of the 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review and was broadly commented on in this context and took on the character of being novel doctrine – despite the fact that the QDR is not supposed to be a doctrinal exercise. Tysdall wrote: “Gone is the talk of swift victories that preceded the 2003 Iraq invasion. This will be a war of attrition, it [the QDR] says, fought on many fronts.”
The issue is presented as the revolutionary realization that any hope of a rapid victory is now buried in the sands of Iraq. It is a matter of envisaging a long fight, a very long fight, that will cost us ‘blood, sweat and tears’ (not to speak of billions of dollars for the Pentagon). This romantic and dramatic vision is moving but it presents the inconvenience of being totally false. A rapid look back suffices to observe that in September October 2001, rumors abounded of what this ‘war without end’ now held in store for us. The hypotheses extended from a second Cold War to a ‘new Hundred Years’ War’, to poor Colin Powell’s announcement of 23 September 2001 of a “war waged by America against terrorism that will succeed but which can never end”. (How is one to square the circle of ‘victory in a war that will never end’?)
In other words, ‘The Long War’ is nothing new, it is in fact old wine in a new bottle, trotted out for the occasion – in the case of Rove, we saw why. For the Pentagon generals and the Puzzle Palace bureaucracy, the ‘Long War’ idea is nothing less than a sort of ‘normalization’ of the policy of constant, unending mobilization of a paroxysmic government on a permanent wartime footing. The Pentagon’s concept is well described in Simon Tysdall’s remarks, which he wrote after meeting General Mark Kimmet (“a key strategist in the US Central Command covering the Middle East”, noted The Guardian), who was passing through London on 6 February. It boils down to this: war, yes, and, if possible, a ‘Long War’, without end, but, most important – never again a war in Iraq!
The QDR, ‘The Long War’ and 9/11 Nostalgia
The attack of 11 September 2001 precipitated a phenomenon that has been unavoidable since the Great Depression and the establishment of what is termed the ‘Military-Industrial Complex’ or the MIC. The exponential development of the structures and of the complexity of our civilization, and the parallel development of raw power and of the interests that comprise it, combined during the Great Depression to create a totally unprecedented perception of the fragility of the process. It was the critical coming together of power (primarily in the form of technology) and of psychology – a diabolical marriage of extremes. The momentary attitude dictated by the situation was that it was necessary to maintain one’s spirits in order to avoid deterioration of the psyche – deterioration of one’s mind and soul. Only mobilization provided an acceptable solution, and one could only mobilize against ‘The Enemy’. And so began the rule of paroxysmic government reflecting the requirements of the system (even more than its interests, even if such interests were in fact met – the interests being incidental to the requirements, as it were).
There is no conspiracy to it, but a policy of survival, since the perception (the psychology) is built on the marriage of power and fragility. After the disappearance of the Soviet Enemy, which seemed to have ensured stability and to have conferred a benevolent rationality on this Weltanschauung, 9/11 came along proclaiming Powell’s ‘war without end’, before ‘The Long War’, which is now bringing up the rear four and a half years later. The world has itself become one great paroxysm and paroxysmic has become normality – or more accurately, normality has become paroxysmic.
Under these circumstances, the war in Iraq is a perverse event. The Neocons and their neo-imperialist friends, ‘useful idiots’, have finally proven themselves an embarrassment because their pompous strategies suppose a rational end – democracy and/or the conquest of the world. As it turns out, it is Powell who is the most Americanist, with his ‘war without end’, and not Perle, Kagan & Co., with their imperious dreams fed by the cockamamie theories of that vituperative, presumptuous Americanist Thucydides of a military historian George Davis Hanson.
The Pentagon very quickly recoiled in horror from the imminent Iraq adventure. It went along reluctantly, after voicing strenuous objections. What ensued was the invasion of Iraq and its disastrous aftermath. Iraq somehow obliterated 9/11 and 9/11 somehow became ‘Paradise Lost’. ‘The Long War’ takes us back to 9/11 and the QDR, which is the apology for the new doctrine (‘old wine, new bottle’) is worthy of the Pentagon. Chalk up one successful hijacking!
In the Senate on 7 February, the senators – always overreaching, with each of them vying to paint himself as more patriotic than the other – solemnly proclaimed the inadequacy of the DoD FY 2007 budget. And the most hawkish among them were the Democrats, who are known to lay it on when the occasion requires. The super-patriotic taunting was aimed at Donald Rumsfeld, who had come to present the budget. The Secretary of Defense, placed in the unexpected and uncomfortable position of having to defend himself against budgetary increases that the senators were seeking to impose on him, replied: “Would everyone always like more? You bet. But it’s not needed. There is always a big bow wave out there of expenses that look unaffordable but invariably prove to be manageable.”
It is an extraordinary affirmation of either cynicism or of lucidity. Rumsfeld tells us at the same time as he tells the Senators: “You can babble on, but the bureaucracy does what it wants, gets what it wants and, in the end, comes out not too bad – it always manages to meet its budget in which waste and overruns abound. So what is the point of a few billion more?” Again he tells us that accounting and sound management are the least of the bureaucracy’s concerns. The Pentagon is such a monster of mad, insane accounting that one always manages to find a few billion to top up one program or the other, even if that means going to Congress cap in hand to ask for a supplemental budget.
In juxtaposition to this squib from Rumsfeld, which shows his total disillusionment, we look at a statement by a DoD expert who participated in a seminar held in Brussels on 23 January 2006. Asked about the DoD budget situation and its outlook, he replied placidly: “Nowadays, it’s all and only – I say only – a question of pork barrel.” The Pentagon budget is decided upon and allocated on the basis of the local interests of the individual states, and those interests are decided on by the legislators elected to the Congress, who, as representatives of those individual states. act strictly with a view to the next electoral contest. Period!
In the face of these statements which lead to viewing the Pentagon’s budget hang-ups – and all that goes with it in terms of doctrine and strategy – in such a jaded and disabused way, one is compelled to conclude that the QDR was an exercise in futility which was bound to end up the way it did and that things will continue in much the same, ‘business-as-usual’, way. It is a way of seeing things that can look to the past for countless examples of the same ilk – a completely nihilistic way of looking at things whose byword as regards reform, is ‘It doesn’t have the chance of a snowball in Hell’. Pentagon reform has no future. Period!
The Future of the Pentagon and the Laws that Govern the World
These disabused observations would seem to say that nothing can stop the machine and that the Pentagon will continue to devour billions of dollars and to develop all its programs – especially those needed to fight the last war and imaginary wars galore. In doing so, it would implicitly be adopting the thesis that history no longer exists – the thesis that history, war and anything else capable of shaping the world transpire at the Pentagon, i.e. there is no reality outside the five-sided Puzzle Palace. And doing that would be tantamount to forgetting that history exists.
The fact remains that the Pentagon has taken a quarter of a century (since 1981) to develop a fighter aircraft (the F/A-22), announced at the outset as costing $37 million, that will ultimately come in at around $300 million – still without knowing whether it will serve any useful purpose. The fact remains that the Pentagon – because of its quintessential behemoth clumsiness (overseas deployments, logistic constraints, waste, inability to reform structurally, etc.) – is incapable of deploying more than 150,000 men in Iraq, and that the situation there is beginning to take on the appearance of a historic disaster. (The Pentagon must be beholden to Rumsfeld for having decided that the commitment there would be reduced. The US Army wanted 400,000 troops for Iraq: Where would it have gotten them? But perhaps that too was a way of trying to stop the planned invasion…)
The fact remains that all the budget increases now seem to only increase the disorder, turning the massive Gulliver into a helpless Lilliputian. ‘Augustine’s Law’ proclaimed in 1978 is not far from being proven (Augustine, then in the Pentagon before going to industry to head up Martin Marietta, then Lockheed Martin) – it is even closer than the prophet had announced: “
In the way that the Pentagon has evolved, it is incapable of growing and developing. It has become an uncontrollable monster that is totally beyond earthly laws. And therein lies the ultimate challenge, the final trial, for an administration that has no intention of laying aside its imperious plans and which is even counting on the ‘results’ already achieved in pursuing those plans (see the Iran crisis).
Short of hijacking reality, as it hijacked the QDR, the Pentagon remains fated to be confronted with the outside world. The prediction of one source in Congress in early February, remains within the realm of the possible: “This really does not bode well for the look of the defense budget … the year after this will be really tough.”
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