How America Broke Its Own Military
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How America Broke Its Own Military<br>ByMatt Kennard<br>The most powerful army on earth was stretched past its limits — not by its enemies, but by the politicians who drove it into unwinnable wars.
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‘I just can’t imagine someone looking at the United States armed forces today and suggesting that they are close to breaking.’<br>— Donald Rumsfeld, 2006
On 10 September 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stood in front of the assembled great and good of the Pentagon and delivered an expansive lecture entitled ‘Bureaucracy to Battlefield’. Its prescriptions were radical — among the most portentous in US military history — but thanks to the terrorist atrocities the following day, his words remain buried deep in the memory hole, while their consequences are buried under the sands of Iraq and Afghanistan. ‘The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America’, Rumsfeld began, before revealing the threat to be not Al-Qaeda, but the ‘Pentagon bureaucracy.’ ‘Not the people, but the processes’, he added reassuringly. ‘Not the civilians, but the systems. Not the men and women in uniform, but the uniformity of thought and action that we too often impose on them.’ In essence, Rumsfeld’s speech that day was designed to lay the ground and soften up his workers for a massive privatization of the Department of Defense’s services. It was the realization of a long-held dream for Republican politicians and their corporate allies in Washington — who would now be presented with a sweet shop full of lucrative government contacts to chew on.<br>With the tragic events of 9/11 and the ensuing two-front ground war in the Middle East, Rumsfeld got an opportunity to enact his programme with minimal opposition. The results were clear eight years into the War on Terror, when the DOD had 95,461 private contractors working for them in Iraq compared to 95,900 US military personnel. The use of private contractors was by then so embedded that Barack Obama’s pledge on the campaign trail in 2008 to bring an end to the practice became just another broken promise among many. But while the privatisation of the war effort is a topic that has been explored extensively by a number of journalists, notably Jeremy Scahill, one aspect of the program has received little coverage — namely Rumsfeld’s plan for soldiers on the payroll of the DOD. This was a scheme that would prove catastrophic for the troops and the occupied populations living under them. Veiled in the language of business-style efficiency savings, Rumsfeld’s plan was intended to eviscerate the US military, which was to become merely an appendage to the massive private forces the US would soon employ.
‘In this period of limited funds,’ Rumsfeld continued, ‘we need every nickel, every good idea, every innovation, every effort to help modernize and transform the US military.’ This could only be done by changing the basics of how the Pentagon worked, in a process that would later be dubbed ‘Transformation’: ‘Many of the skills we most require are also in high demand in the private sector, as all of you know. To compete, we need to bring the Department of Defense the human resources practices that have already transformed the private sector.’ Even the DOD itself was to be run like a corporation: ‘We must employ the tools of modern business. More flexible compensation packages, modern recruiting techniques and better training.’ What Rumsfeld wanted was a scaled-down, streamlined US military — a reversal of what had become known as the Powell Doctrine, named for the Desert Storm general Colin Powell, who believed in high troop numbers, ‘overwhelming force’, and a defined exit strategy.<br>It was a risky approach for Rumsfeld to take. Even before 9/11, Powell, by now Secretary of State, had observed that ‘Our armed forces are stretched rather thin, and there is a limit to how many of these deployments we can sustain.’ That would prove to be an understatement. But Rumsfeld was backed in his new approach by his boss, President George W. Bush, who much to Powell’s consternation shared the same vision: ‘Building tomorrow’s force is not going to be easy. Changing the direction of our military is like changing the course of a mighty ship’, Bush said in May 2001.<br>The oft-repeated cliché is that everything changed on September 11, and indeed it did for millions of Americans. But not for Rumsfeld: his priorities stayed the same, while his popularity surged as he was pictured helping victims of the attack at the Pentagon into ambulances. He now had not only the ultimate cover for changing the course of the mighty ship and designing a...