Rumsfeld is at war - with the U.S. Army
Now, even his hand-picked successor as Army Chief of Staff is in open revolt. This is way beyond partisan politics, comrades. I’m struggling for less strident tone, but can’t get there. Rumsfeld and Bush are showing terrible disrespect for, and are damaging our military.
Here’s the latest. General Schoomaker, the Army Chief of Staff, has refused to submit a budget.
The Army’s top officer withheld a required 2008 budget plan from Pentagon leaders last month after protesting to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that the service could not maintain its current level of activity in Iraq plus its other global commitments without billions in additional funding.
The decision by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army’s chief of staff, is believed to be unprecedented and signals a widespread belief within the Army that in the absence of significant troop withdrawals from Iraq, funding assumptions must be completely reworked, say current and former Pentagon officials.
“This is unusual, but hell, we’re in unusual times,” said a senior Pentagon official involved in the budget discussions.
Schoomaker failed to submit the budget plan by an Aug. 15 deadline. The protest followed a series of cuts in the service’s funding requests by both the White House and Congress over the last four months.
According to a senior Army official involved in budget talks, Schoomaker is now seeking $138.8 billion in 2008, nearly $25 billion above budget limits originally set by Rumsfeld. The Army’s budget this year is $98.2 billion, making Schoomaker’s request a 41% increase over current levels.
“It’s incredibly huge,” said the Army official, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity when commenting on internal deliberations. “These are just incredible numbers.”
Schoomaker has been vocal in recent months about a need to expand war funding legislation to pay for repair of hundreds of tanks and armored fighting vehicles after heavy use in Iraq. In recent weeks, however, Schoomaker has become more publicly emphatic about budget shortfalls, saying funding is not enough to pay for Army commitments to the Iraq war and the global strategy outlined by the Pentagon.
“There’s no sense in us submitting a budget that we can’t execute, a broken budget,” Schoomaker said in a recent Washington address.
I expect Rumsfeld, Powder Line, and other administration apologists to pile on Schoomaker, portraying him as some sort of Moonbat, a Leftie Kossack infiltrator into the Department of Defense, or perhaps merely another stodgy, antiquated, uber-grunt, the kind of military bureaucrat who has been standing in the way of Rumsfeld’s “transformation” strategy.
But wait. … Who is General Peter Schoomaker? How did he come to be Army Chief of Staff in 2003? He was a career Special Forces guy, a guy junior to many other 4-stars and 3-stars, who Rummy called out of retirement to head up the Army:
Washington Times - June 11, 2003
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has picked a retired Special Forces general as his choice for the next Army chief of staff, defense officials said yesterday. Mr. Rumsfeld is recommending that President Bush nominate retired Army Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker to replace the outgoing Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki. The choice of Gen. Schoomaker is seen as part of Mr. Rumsfeld’s effort to reshape the service from a structure of large, heavily armored divisions into a more agile force modeled on Special Forces commandos, who played key roles in recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The pick is viewed as a slap at the current roster of Army four-star and three-star generals vying for the service’s top post, because defense secretaries do not usually reach outside the ranks of current active-duty officers to pick a chief of staff.
Mr. Rumsfeld has often battled senior Army officials, including Gen. Shinseki, during the past two years about the pace of his “transformation” plans for the Army. Army Secretary Thomas White, who also clashed with Mr. Rumsfeld, resigned in April under pressure. The White House has nominated Air Force Secretary James Roche, who is considered a Rumsfeld loyalist, for the Army post.
Mr. Rumsfeld has had close ties to Gen. Schoomaker, unlike Gen. Shinseki. In the fall of 2001, the defense secretary called on Gen. Schoomaker for advice during the start of military operations against the Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan.
“Essentially, this is a pick that Rumsfeld has made in order to change the Army,” the former official said. “Rumsfeld has been talking to Schoomaker on and off since October 2001.”
Gen. Schoomaker ended his career in 2000, after three years as commander in chief of the U.S. Special Operations Command. Only a handful of retired generals have been recalled from retirement for high-level active duty.
Schoomaker is (or was) Rumsfeld’s own man. And even he has gone into revolt. This really has to stop.
Schoomaker’s budget revolt comes on top of this, which I suppose could be called “old news.”
Clausewitz v. Rumsfeld
A long way from “shock and awe”
You go to war with the god you have
Rummy Out
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in Iraq