Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [349]
By late 2005, the several billion dollars we had invested in the IED problem had resulted in progress. Casualties were down, even though the number of attacks had spiraled upward. Still, I wanted a more focused senior Army leadership, so I called another general out of retirement and back to duty: four-star General Montgomery C. Meigs. Meigs focused the Joint IED Defeat Organization on the people making the bombs and the enemy networks that sustained them. Armor continued to arrive in the theater, including the first prototypes of the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) V-hulled vehicles that afforded more protection to the troops. Increased local cooperation and better intelligence about the insurgent networks led to more coalition operations against those who were making the weapons. The IED challenge—and the amount of time it took to equip the force and adjust to the enemy’s tactics—highlighted again the need to accelerate the transformation of our military.
I steadily pushed each service to become more agile, more deployable, and better prepared to confront new, previously unanticipated threats.14 We redirected the Air Force’s energies and resources toward fielding more unmanned aerial vehicles, which by 2008 numbered over five thousand—a twenty-fivefold increase since 9/11.15 Under the leadership of Admiral Vern Clark, the Navy developed a new Fleet Response Plan to double its efficiency and the number of carrier strike groups available for global deployment at any given time. I encouraged the Marines to develop a special operations contingent.
The Army faced the biggest challenges. It has a proud and storied history dating back to the Continental Army of 1775. Under such legendary generals as Grant and Sherman, it preserved the Union in a tough-fought civil war. Under Pershing and Eisenhower it liberated Europe in two world wars. The Army manned the front lines of the Cold War flashpoints, its heavy tanks and artillery acting as a deterrent against a Soviet ground advance in Central Europe. For decades the Army had been organized for large land battles between sovereign states, symbolized by the service’s prized seventy-ton M-1 Abrams tank. The immediate challenges we confronted by 2001 though were not from massed enemy forces. By then our adversaries had learned that confronting the United States in a conventional war of massed force was a bad idea. As a result, America was unlikely to soon face the major land, sea, and air battles for which our military had organized, trained, and equipped over many decades. Instead, we needed a military that could quickly deploy in enough numbers to bring decisive lethality to bear, could leverage our country’s technological advantages, such as precision, communications, and stealth, and most important—could quickly adapt to changing circumstances in a given conflict and prevail.
Despite the unquestionable improvements made over the years—in many cases as the result of the lessons learned from the unconventional conflicts of the 1980s and 1990s—the Army was the most resistant to adapting to the new challenges and accelerating its transformation away from its Cold War posture of large, difficult to deploy, heavy divisions.
The small-scale unconventional conflicts of the Cold War, in Panama, El Salvador, Grenada, Lebanon, and elsewhere, were seen almost as distractions and diversions from what the Army was supposed to do and how it was