Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [350]
In the twenty-first century, however, the task was not to “overwhelm” nations and people who were not our enemies. The enemy was not the local population but the terrorists and insurgents living, training, and fighting among them. This came to be the case in the post-9/11 conflicts we were fighting, including the counterinsurgency campaigns that evolved in Iraq and Afghanistan. These required measured application of military power to minimize civilian casualties and encourage local cooperation.
It also struck me that the new realities of warfare meant that our military should be prepared to be used earlier in order to avoid full-scale conflicts altogether. Merely by their presence abroad or the ability to deploy rapidly, our troops could reassure allies and, in some instances, deter aggression from hostile nations or nonstate actors. They could train foreign forces, as they have in Colombia, Georgia, Jordan, and Kenya, so that the militaries of our friends and allies would be better able to take up the fight against mutual threats—instead of leaving it to our men and women in uniform, who carry more than their share of the burden. They could provide critical intelligence to stop terrorist attacks. They could lend a hand in natural disasters around the world, earning valuable goodwill for the United States by their actions, as we did in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami and the Pakistan earthquakes.
There were officers in the Army who understood the importance of deployability and speed, and who had taken aboard the lessons of previous unconventional conflicts. During the first Gulf War, there had been flashes of brilliance in the ground campaign that suggested that agility, mobility, and speed had their place in the Army. Throughout the 1990s the Army tried to resolve the tension between advocates for greater change and those who were reluctant to push too hard because of the momentum behind existing programs and weapons systems—momentum that would have to be shifted significantly if true transformation were to occur. During the late 1990s, Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki had wisely challenged the Army with the adage that “if you don’t like change, you’ll like irrelevance a lot less.”
Early on, it became apparent to those of us urging the Army to change that transforming it would be a contentious process. We would need to cancel some major Cold War–era weapon-development programs and encourage unconventional thinkers in the leadership who could help to move the institution.
After thorough reviews by the Army, the Pentagon’s program analysis and evaluation (PA&E) office, and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, I announced in May 2002 that I was cancelling the $11 billion Crusader artillery system.17 Beyond its stunningly ill-conceived name, the program was an anachronism that typified the challenges we faced. A forty-ton, 155 millimeter howitzer, the Crusader could launch a shell from the Washington Mall and hit Camden Yards in Baltimore. But it was the antithesis of agility and deployability. The Crusader required two large cargo aircraft to deploy just one system with its ammunition and equipment, and it required considerable time and effort to assemble it on arrival. It wasn’t clear what role it could play in mountainous, land-locked Afghanistan, for example. I decided instead to use the $9 billion that had not yet been spent on it to invest in precision-guided weapon systems.
As with the M-1 Abrams tank issue in the Ford administration, my decision on the Crusader provoked near rebellion in the Army establishment,