Hope is not a

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Hope is not a plan, as the Army planners say. And they say it for a reason …

Here is our text for the day. It comes from an interview last evening on PBS’s Newshour, when Gwen Ifill asked retired Colonel Samuel Gardiner whether the momentum of the campaign could be sustained. Gardiner said

No. I just want to add a political military dimension. Yesterday a very important thing happened. Two retired four-star generals: Wes Clark and Barry McCaffrey, who was a division commander in the first Gulf War, said we don’t have enough force. Whether they are right or not, the leadership of the United States has a problem. And that is if we go to Baghdad with two divisions and there are losses, that’s regime change kind of stuff. And I don’t mean Baghdad regime change. But you don’t send American men and women into battle without all it takes to do that. I mean, that’s a very serious thing.

Now, a few points. I know Gardiner was only talking about changes of government at the ballot box but I’m still always a bit uncomfortable when even retired military men talk publicly about US governments being turned out because of poor military decisions. I didn’t like it under Clinton; and I don’t like it now. Retired military officers have as much right to speak out as the rest of us. But given the importance of civilian supremacy over the military, there’s a penumbra of prudence that stretches over the public comments of even retired career officers. (Late Update: My criticism, if there is any, is not directed at McCaffrey and Clark. I think it’s not only right but incumbent on them to speak out. My only point is that, in the case of Gardiner, it may be the better part of wisdom for retired career officers to speak out against bad defense policy but leave spelling out the political consequences to others. Again, a mild, tentative criticism, but one that I think worth voicing.)

Having said that, his comments get at a very big issue and one that may have profound political implications. War is, by definition, unpredictable. But what we’re seeing right now was predicted. The predictions were just ignored.

Relations between the Pentagon’s civilian political leadership and the uniformed services has been more vexed and acrimonious in the last two years than it has been for decades. (I discussed this at greater length in this article I wrote last August in Salon — you can also see it here — and touched on part of the debate in this earlier post.) The disagreements range over a number of issues including war-planning, ‘transformation,’ force structure and military-diplomatic relations with various countries across the world. At heart, however, the civilians believed the folks in uniform were overly conservative, risk-averse and failed to understand how technology had transformed modern warfare.

Don Rumsfeld (and Rumsfeld, in this case, stands for Rumsfeld and his various civilian deputies) thought Saddam Hussein could be taken down with a relatively small number of ground forces in conjunction with fast-moving and agile high-tech air power and special forces. (Keep in mind that the Pentagon’s civilian leadership originally wanted to mount this war with as few as a quarter of the troops we now have in the theater.) The Sec Def’s military advisors told him he was sending them into Iraq under-gunned. They argued about it for months. Rumsfeld thought he knew better than they did, however, and sent them in that way regardless of their objections.

We’ll be saying more about this. And I think it’s still to soon to fully evaluate Rumsfeld’s plan. Perhaps Saddam’s regime will collapse spectacularly in the coming days. But at the moment the results of Rumsfeld’s gamble are not looking very good.

P.S. Special thanks to valued TPM reader BZ for sending the Newshour link …

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