War and Peace
Hunter Looks to the Future of the Military as America’s Battles Continue
Last month marked the second anniversary of the liberation of Baghdad from Saddam Hussein’s rule. While American troops remain stationed in Iraq, some members of the military and the Bush administration believe soldiers may start coming home within the next year, to the relief of family and friends.
Meanwhile, U.S. forces also remain in Afghanistan, raising questions about whether the military is properly equipped, with both adequate personnel and technology, to maintain two fronts. With the $82 billion war supplemental spending set for final passage next week, Roll Call Executive Editor Morton M. Kondracke sat down with House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) last week to discuss these and other issues facing the military.
ROLL CALL: How good is Don Rumsfeld going to be when he comes back up against all the other Defense secretaries of your career?
REP. DUNCAN HUNTER: I think he’s a great Defense secretary. ... He’s been able to handle a lot of issues under very stressful conditions and keep his eye on the horizon and at the same time handle the media requirements. ... He’s a guy who’s adept with ongoing wars in two theaters and yet with long-term challenges that require a lot of him. I think he’s done extraordinarily well.
ROLL CALL: What do you make of the charge that he has sort of stifled the military, that they’re afraid to say what they think?
HUNTER: I disagree with it. I think of guys like [Army Chief of Staff Peter] Schoomaker who’s extraordinarily outspoken, tough, break-the-mold kind of guy. I think of guys like that, he’s done anything but surround himself with “yes men.” I think Rumsfeld is tough, but he likes dissent. And he likes people to be aggressive and forward-leaning.
ROLL CALL: Do you think that he did an adequate job of preparing for the aftermath of the Iraq war?
HUNTER: Yeah. In the sense that the road not traveled was always perceived to be smoother. You’ve got the folks who said, well, first they of course predicted we’d get bogged down. When you look at the criticism you get, you shouldn’t bifurcate before the war, before taking Baghdad, and afterwards. The people who were saying we could never take Baghdad ‘til we got more people, ‘til we got more boots on the ground, had their interviews interrupted by news flashes that Tommy Franks had taken yet another stronghold, literally.
And so if you watched their post-mortem interviews with the same people who basically said, “Yeah it looks like we were wrong.” We took Baghdad — we had plenty of people. We had plenty of people to take Baghdad. We did it in a lightning fashion that minimized casualties. Now the idea that the country of 25 million people that you could, by flooding the AO with Americans, could somehow magically prevent lootings and save the national museums and all these other places, I think is pretty much wishful thinking. We’ve cut the Army from 18 Army divisions in the ’90s to 10. We only have 10 active Army divisions. There are roughly 180,000 Marines on the face of the Earth. The argument that we should’ve stuffed all those people or stuffed as many as we could into the theater and somehow it would’ve brought order is I think, once again, simply wishful thinking. It’s an extension of the debate by the same people who said there weren’t enough people to take Baghdad. They were clearly wrong there. And you had interestingly, on the other side, you had two schools of thought. Kind of the [Sen.] Joe Biden [D-Del.] schools of thought — one was that we needed more people in there, and the second was that we needed to give the occupation an Iraqi face and reduce our presence. Now, how do you do that? If you put a GI on every street corner, how do you turn it into an Iraqi operation? So, I think that the secretary and the war fighters and Tommy Franks and his successors have exercised good judgment. Clearly now, having more people in Iraq, having simply more boots on the ground is not an answer to [improvised explosive devices]. In fact, what it does is produce more targets for IEDs. It puts in a requirement for more convoys. A great deal of the attacks on the U.S. have been simple convoys that have been supplying the presence, the firebases. So you increase the presence, you put in a couple more divisions, and what do you do? You massively increase the amount of transport that takes place on those highways and thereby the vulnerability of the transporters. The more IED opportunities for the insurgents. I think none of these things come wrapped in neat packages, but I think that the idea that everything would’ve been calm at this point if we had flooded Iraq with American troops is as inaccurate as the early prognostications that we would bog down.
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The intelligence community faces challenges daily. No example is more emblematic of the problems faced than the so-called underwear bomber of 2009. As threats emerge, the hunt for “persons of interest” must occur in a more reliable and efficient manner because the consequences of inaction can be catastrophic. Read Full Article
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