Word: rumsfelds
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...Army is stretched too thin. More than a few heads snapped when Peter Schoomaker, the yanked-from-retirement general who is now the Army Chief of Staff, said in his confirmation hearing in late July that he "intuitively" thought "we need more people." His gut feeling apparently changed after Rumsfeld howled that Schoomaker's remarks had been distorted. "There's no daylight between the Secretary of Defense and me on this issue," Schoomaker told TIME. "We need to have more time to formally assess this issue." But the General Accounting Office, in its assessment released two weeks ago, warned that...
...invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have taught the Pentagon two very different and seemingly contradictory lessons. First, as Rumsfeld likes to argue now, the U.S. does not need huge forces to invade and win. For almost two decades, U.S. war planners were guided by Colin Powell's doctrine of using overwhelming force. But the wars so far in the second Bush era have been fought and won with notably smaller invading armies, U.S. air power and special forces having been married to terrifyingly precise effect. Pentagon officials boast that they toppled Saddam Hussein with only 60% of the troops their...
What really worries Rumsfeld is not Congress but the spouses, members of Army families who have had about all they can take of Dad (or, increasingly, Mom) being away six, nine and 12 months a year. Unlike the Army of 1973, which largely comprised single draftees, the Army today is married with children and all-volunteer. The long deployments are stressing marriages and families to the breaking point, and most active-duty personnel have skills valued in the civilian world, as the recruiting posters promise. Holly Petraeus, wife of Major General David Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne, told Senate...
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld talked to TIME's Mark Thompson last week about his campaign to wring more fighting power out of the U.S. military without increasing troop size. He said he had proposed some 40 ways to do so in an 11-page memo now being circulated among senior Pentagon officials. Rumsfeld spoke by phone while on a plane headed to an undisclosed location. Excerpts...
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld got himself into trouble earlier this year after several lawmakers called for a return to the draft as a way of opposing the looming war with Iraq. In response, Rumsfeld declared that the 16 million Americans who were conscripted from 1917 to 1973 had added "no value, no advantage really, to the U.S. armed services over any sustained period of time." Rumsfeld apologized after veterans groups criticized his comments. But Pentagon officials stand by his key message: draftees tend to serve shorter terms than volunteers, so the armed services get less use out of their training...