Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, (a man who was forced out of office by the Shinseki clique) was the architect of the only workable and imaginative "transformation" of the military. He created his outlook after a cold realization that the Clintonista generals, left over from the ruinous Clinton regime, had embraced the worse concepts ever to threaten the lethality of US ground forces. Most of Rumsfeld’s focus was upon transforming the army, the most important ground combatant force. The army version of transformation was developed by Eric K. Shinseki retired Chief of Staff United States Army, darling of the media left and leading Clintonista. He was supported by a host of incompetent and self-serving conventional army generals (some now working for General Dynamics) who became convinced that the US Army must be converted into a poorly armed, unarmored (no tanks) international police force as a result of their mind melds with Bubba Clinton. The Balkan experience of the Shinseki generals clique also infected many of them with a strong sympathy for muslim imperialism.
That entire clique of US Army conventional generals were protégés of the neo-marxist President Bubba and had, over an eight-year period, adapted Clinton’s view of the world. During Clinton’s administration America’s conventional generals demonstrated a new low in risk-aversion. Literally, every time of crisis that demanded military daring and gumption, was parried with a set of clichés including: “That’s too Hollywood.” “That’s too complicated.” “That’s too dangerous to world peace.” (See www.quikmaneuvers.com\bureaucrat_generals.html and www.quikmaneuvers.com\generals_gone_bad.html )
The army general’s transformation scheme was a serious mistake but a clear example of the decadence of America’s conventional generals. They wanted to transform the US Army into Bubba Clinton’s version of a military, a Balkans-style police force. Shinseki and his unimaginative crew asked themselves: “How would a military police force be armed?” By thumbing through a few books, they saw that such a “force” would be very light and organized to fight gangsters who had no RPGs. The result was Shinseki’s
vulnerable, rubber-tired wheeled Stryker Brigade Combat Teams (SBCT). The six SBCT Brigades, now deployed in Iraq, have little firepower, no true ground reconnaissance, no armor, and are sitting ducks for any armed guerilla force. Such units are not able to stand up to a modern armored army for a moment, or a few muslims with RPGs for very long. Tanks rule in urban combat.
Shinseki’s clique bragged that they had rendered the tank obsolescent. Yet in Baghdad, Fallujah and elsewhere it was verified repeatedly that the presence of Abrams tanks facilitates victory by US forces at minimal cost in casualties. (See www.quikmaneuvers.com\tanks_in_the_city.html )
Shinseki’s new army of light weight, poorly armed constabulary was supposed to somehow overcome its massive weaknesses with the notion of complete situational awareness, (The daily images of burning rubber-tired wheeled vehicles in Iraq makes a mockery of this notion on a daily basis) and stand-off firepower (Where's that firepower supposed to come from? The air?). (See www.quikmaneuvers.com\secrets_of_improvised_explosive_devices.html )
The Shinseki clique is the enemy of every key tactic that serves to make the US Army great. For example, they claim that the US Army does not need ground reconnaissance and can be "totally situationally aware by depending upon technology." Colonel Grimsley, commander of First BCT, Third Infantry Division commented that he finally understood what the enemy was doing in the town of An Najaf when Iraqi citizens drove out to one of his tank battalions and told the soldiers what was taking place. According to the locals, the Special Republican Guard and the Fedayeen Sadaam were conscripting locals and compelling them to attack the Americans. All the UAV or satellite imagery in the world would not have revealed this critical detail about the enemy strategy. (A professional army, involved in life and death struggle with the most dangerous mass of psychopathic religious cult fanatics and treasonous domestic leftists ever seen on earth, cannot afford to let luck provide it with HUMINT.) (See www.quikmaneuvers.com\us_long_range_reconnaissance.html )
The Shinseki clique bragged that their brand of US Army military intelligence was so fine that "no enemy could get within miles without being easily detected." The largest conventional tank battle of the war occurred on the morning of 3 April 2003, when elements of three Iraqi brigades consisting of no less than 100 armored vehicles and up to 10,000 soldiers converged on 3-69 Armor as they guarded a critical bridge crossing the Euphrates River at Objective Peach. That type of large conventional force was the ideal formation that the extensive surveillance network operating in Iraq should have been able to detect. Lieutenant Colonel Marcone commander of 3-69 Armor, reported that, “the Iraqi Republican Guard did nothing special to conceal their intentions or their movements. They attacked en masse using tactics that are more recognizable with the Soviet army of World War II”. Despite the large conventional force moving against him, Lieutenant Colonel Marcone reported that, “we got nothing until they slammed into us.” In fact, the battalion did not receive a single piece of intelligence from their higher headquarters to indicate that such a large attack was imminent. The commander had terrible “situational awareness” that night in spite of the large array of airborne reconnaissance platforms that were supposedly watching his front. With almost no early warning, 3-69 Armor was able to successfully fight off the attack due to the unit’s quality training, superior armor protection, and the disjointed nature of the Iraqi attack. No greater indictment can exist for US Army military intelligence and the Shinseki concept of no strong ground reconnaissance forces. (See www.quikmaneuvers.com\combat_intelligence_iraq_1.html and www.quikmaneuvers.com\combat_intelligence_iraq_2.html )
Conventional US Army generals had their own transformation plan long before Rumsfeld came on the scene. The conventional general’s ideas were worse than incompetent; they were treasonous because they disarmed the army. It’s easily documented that the army’s conventional generals, not Rumsfeld, saw its own infantry as nothing more than a constabulary to "clean up" after a conventional warfare mess caused by “a perfectly targeted enemy that was killed from afar”. The plans of the Shinseki cult to totally moth ball all US tanks is a matter of record. Nothing the army has done in the recent past had made it adept at fighting long-term insurgencies or terrorist uprisings (Intifadas), and that goes back to the Reagan Administration. The days of the army’s acceptance of winning maneuver doctrine has disappeared, replaced by the same old awkward attrition methods that had lost the Vietnam War. Shinseki and his clique proved that US conventional generals and admirals are incompetent to fight a war. (See www.quikmaneuvers.com\fallujah_battles.html and www.quikmaneuvers.com\fallujah_battles_2.html )
