Word: rumsfeld
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...question openly debated last week was whether Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld bet right when he decided on the scope of the invading force. Deployment is now at 250,000, but only the Army's 3rd Infantry Division is a heavy fighting force, and just 150,000 of the total are ground-combat troops. Chairman Myers insisted last week that the U.S. had deployed "just the right forces." Certainly those forces had a lot to do, from taking Baghdad to searching for Saddam's bio-chem weapons to delivering water and food to civilians. An additional 2,000 soldiers reach...
...satisfy the Powell doctrine of overwhelming force. Standard Army practice prescribes two heavy divisions for a campaign of this magnitude. Bush the elder fielded 540,000 U.S. troops to kick Saddam out of the desert wastes of Kuwait. For the more ambitious task of driving Saddam from power, Rumsfeld pushed Franks to fight with half that number, fewer troops and less armor than the general originally wanted. But the current battle plan is all part of the Defense Secretary's conviction that a more potent, smaller, higher-tech force can win in new ways. Army officers have complained throughout...
...wisdom of launching U.S. troops into battle without pounding the enemy silly first. In the 1991 war, bombers pummeled Iraq for 39 days before the tanks rolled in, and almost 100,000 dazed Iraqis rushed to surrender. Franks pressed for a 14-day bombing campaign this time, but Rumsfeld rejected it as old think. The accelerated push has subjected a nearly 300-mile supply line snaking back to Kuwait to repeated nighttime ambushes. Units have had to be siphoned off to protect it. Tanks have had to be turned on rear-guard guerrillas rather than on the Republican Guards...
...that U.S. and British forces have suffered battlefield setbacks to the constant reports of combat from journalists embedded with the troops; those snapshots of the war, military commanders say, have failed to convey the larger picture of the allies' progress. "We're one week into this," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last Friday, "and it seems to me a little early for history to be written...
...Those groups are badly outmuscled by the 325 Abrams tanks, 200 Bradley fighting vehicles and 100 attack helicopters soon to bear down on them. The survivors among the defenders, however, along with the Fedayeen, would probably mount persistent ambushes on coalition troops. At a Pentagon press briefing last week, Rumsfeld said that "this terrorist-type threat ... will very likely continue" throughout the war. Noted an Air Force officer: "It's going to lead to some of our guys getting killed, but it also means they're going to start running out of suicidal maniacs, sooner or later...