IT’S ODD: A secretary of defense in charge of vital counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, peacekeeping, and nation-building operations that have stretched the armed forces to the breaking point is fiercely fighting increases in the size of those forces. Despite calls for more troops from senators John McCain, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Joe Biden, and many others, Donald Rumsfeld has developed plans that rely on magic to cover over the reality that our armed forces are too small. When, inevitably, the magic fails, the United States may find itself in a terrible position in Iraq and in the world. At first, Rumsfeld appeared to accept the premise that there were not enough combat troops available for the missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. He proposed a plan to increase the number of soldiers in combat formations by “civilianizing” Defense Department jobs currently held by active-duty soldiers. At the same time, he proclaimed that larger forces really are not necessary because superior intelligence capabilities will allow the United States to predict our enemies’ actions and enable us to send precisely tailored forces to threatened areas just in time. Both of these proposals conceal the risks and costs that they entail.
Uniformed personnel whom civilians might replace come from two categories: the intellectual parts of the armed forces devoted to long-range planning, concept development, education, and training, and the logistical system that is one of our greatest advantages over allies and enemies. Excluding uniformed personnel from the intellectual activities of the armed forces would exacerbate a trend toward anti-intellectualism in the services. In the worst case, it would leave the United States with uniformed military technicians executing plans and concepts designed by civilian contractors. Given Rumsfeld’s interactions with the military to date, there is reason to suspect that this is, indeed, his goal. The Defense Department, moreover, has already gone far toward entrusting its military thinking to civilians, as the proliferation of projects run by outside think tanks attests. This unfortunate development should be reversed, not reinforced.
Turning the multifarious logistical positions now occupied by uniformed personnel over to civilians is even more misguided. Civilian personnel differ from military personnel in two critical respects. First, they are bound by contracts that specify precisely the duties they are to perform and the circumstances under which they are to perform them. Military personnel are on call 24/7 and their duties are whatever their superiors order them to do. Second, civilians are not expected to face personal danger and do not have the same protection as military personnel. It is neither reasonable nor just–nor in many cases legal–to expect them to place themselves in harm’s way.
These differences have consequences for military activities. When things absolutely have to get done at a certain time, it is possible to order uniformed personnel to do whatever it takes to accomplish them. Civilian contractors cannot be so ordered–their supervisors are legally obliged to abide by the terms of their contracts. Even at critical times, then, civilian contractors may not get things done, and the military personnel relying on them may have no recourse.
This problem is acute in theaters of war, where contractors may become targets of enemy missiles and bombs. Civilian contractors may be no less brave or willing to bear risks than soldiers, but they are neither trained nor equipped to do so. Nor do they have the health care and insurance benefits that help make facing those risks acceptable to the uniformed military or the family support structures that make prolonged deployments tolerable for their families.
One could design contracts for these personnel, to be sure, that put them on call 24/7, provide training and equipment, supply medical and insurance benefits and access to family support structures. But when one has done all of that, one has simply created soldiers without uniforms, and eliminated all of the cost benefits that Rumsfeld sees in “civilianizing” the armed forces.
Further reliance on technology and its supposed efficiencies is equally unacceptable. The notion that U.S. security should depend on the ability of our intelligence technology to warn us of attacks or threats suggests bankruptcy of thought at the senior levels of the Pentagon. It should be enough to list the most recent intelligence failures–notably the September 11 attacks and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq–to show the absurdity of this idea.
More important, this proposal completely misses the current crisis facing the U.S. military. American forces are not overstretched by the danger from potential new crises, foreseen or unforeseen. They are stretched to the breaking point by our current requirements in Iraq alone. Even completely eliminating the U.S. deployments in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan would not save enough troops to make the current deployment in Iraq sustainable. It would free up perhaps 4 of the 12 combat brigades needed to maintain our current force levels in Iraq for more than a year. Perfect clairvoyance about future crises would neither alleviate the current situation nor, for that matter, help us meet new crises, for which we have no forces available.
Recently, Rumsfeld and others have begun to argue that American forces in Iraq can be largely replaced by troops drawn from the international community and by Iraqis themselves, thus obviating the need for any change in the American military structure at all. Considering Rumsfeld’s focus on the need for perfect intelligence, this notion is amazingly shortsighted. The single most important source of intelligence in Iraq–as in any peacekeeping, nation-building, or counterinsurgency situation–is the troops on the ground. Those troops interact with the local population, learn which sources they can trust, and are trusted in turn by the locals to act promptly and intelligently on good information. Replacing American troops with Iraqis will reduce the amount and accuracy of the intelligence we receive.
For one thing, the Iraqis’ traditional solutions to internal disorder involved torture and execution more than the painstaking gathering of intelligence for surgical raids. It will take more than the few months Rumsfeld and others claim to get Iraqi recruits to levels at which they will be useful in these functions. For another thing, some of the Iraqi troops we recruit are certain to be double agents. They will give warning of our activities to the enemy, and they will shield the enemy by providing us with bad information. This sort of thing is going on daily in Iraq already, and it is the job of American soldiers to distinguish good reports from bad. The more we turn the problems of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism over to the Iraqis, the more we place these double agents in positions from which they can do us great harm.
Some international troops will perform their functions well, and, of course, they can be expected to be on our side. Internationalization, however, has significant drawbacks. Each participating state has its own agenda. Some, like the Poles, mainly want to please the United States in hopes of benefiting from a closer relationship. Others, like the Dutch, may have other national interests in mind: Royal Dutch Petroleum is a significant player in the Dutch economy, and KLM has been maneuvering to become the principal carrier to Iraq. The neutrality of such contingents is much more questionable. The use of troops from Muslim countries raises still other concerns, including their reliability, the danger of militant infiltration of their ranks, and the possibility of conflict with the Iraqis, who are by no means friendly with all of the world’s other Muslims.
The biggest problem with internationalization, however, may prove to be that it is impossible. There are very few troops available in the world to support the Iraq operation, and France and other critical states are already indicating that they will participate only at an unacceptable cost.
Each one of these solutions, in short, boils down to magic. Soldiers can be made to appear at relatively low cost. Intelligence technology will eliminate surprise, allowing us to act on the narrowest possible margin. Half-trained Iraqis will relieve thousands of U.S. soldiers. International support will allow American troops to go home soon.
Secretary Rumsfeld is concealing not only the price tag for his approach, but also its dangers. If the technology fails, or the international community does not support us, or the Iraqi police and security forces turn out to be unreliable and ineffective, the United States will fail in Iraq, with horrible consequences. That outcome is unacceptable. To avoid it, the United States must be prepared to keep troop levels in Iraq as high as, or higher than, they are now for a considerable period of time. America will not be able to sustain such a deployment over the long term without increasing its armed forces. Right now, America’s security strategy rests on a razor’s edge. If anything goes wrong in Iraq or elsewhere, the United States cannot rise to the challenge. Rumsfeld’s claims can only conceal that danger. But this is no time to engage in a fairy-tale defense.
Frederick W. Kagan is a military historian and the coauthor of “While America Sleeps.”
