You can politicize the Army promotion system for three- and four-star generals.
Rumsfeld and his civilian aides such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith and his military handmaidens have intruded deeply and harmfully into the way the services promote their leaders.
Where once the Army would send up its nominee for a vacant billet, now it must send up two or three candidates who must run the gantlet of personal interviews in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Not just Rumsfeld, but all of his civilian experts who never wore a uniform. What hoops must the successful one jump through? Will it be the tough, bright candidate who's unafraid to speak when he sees mistakes being made? Or will it be the buttoned-down, willow-in-the-wind, can-do yes-man? Your basic Oliver North?
You can decide that you've discovered a newer, cheaper way of fighting and winning America's wars.
Rumsfeld and company have embraced, on the basis of a fleeting success in Afghanistan and a flawed success in Iraq, a theory that all that's needed to win our wars is air power and small bands of Special Operations troops. Stealth bombers and snake-eaters.
On the strength of this, they've refused all pleas for an urgently needed increase in the strength of an Army that has been whittled down to pre-World War II levels of 485,000 soldiers. They still deny that there's a guerrilla war raging in Iraq, where 130,000 American soldiers are trying to keep the peace in a nation the size of California with 25 million people. Because reinforcement would be an admission that Rumsfeld and company were wrong in their belief that war would end quickly, their hand-picked Iraqi exiles would take over and the soldiers would come home in a few months.
Another defense secretary who could not admit he'd erred was Robert Strange McNamara, who, like Rumsfeld, was recruited from corporate America. By the time he did, it was too late.
