Rumsfeld's Design for War Criticized on the Battlefield
Long-simmering tensions between Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Army commanders have erupted in a series of complaints from officers on the Iraqi battlefield that the Pentagon has not sent enough troops to wage the war as they want to fight it.

Here today, raw nerves were obvious as officers compared Mr. Rumsfeld to Robert S. McNamara, an architect of the Vietnam War who failed to grasp the political and military realities of Vietnam.

One colonel, who spoke on the condition that his name be withheld, was among the officers criticizing decisions to limit initial deployments of troops to the region. "He wanted to fight this war on the cheap," the colonel said. "He got what he wanted."

The angry remarks from the battlefield opened with comments made last Thursday — and widely publicized Friday — by Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, the V Corps commander, who said the military faced the likelihood of a longer war than many strategists had anticipated.

The comments echo the tension in the bumpy relationship between Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff.

Underlying the strains between Mr. Rumsfeld and the Army, which began at the beginning of Mr. Rumsfeld's tenure, are questions that challenge not only the Rumsfeld design for this war but also his broader approach to transforming the military.

The first is why, in an era when American military dominance comes in both the quality of its technology and of its troops, the defense secretary prefers emphasizing long-range precision weapons to putting boots on the ground.

At present, there are about 100,000 coalition troops inside Iraq, part of more than 300,000 on land, at sea and in the air throughout the region for the war. Just under 100,000 more troops stand ready for possible deployment.

Even after the war, some experts argue that it could take several hundred thousand troops to hold and control a country the size of California, with about 24 million people.

Mr. Rumsfeld has argued that he adopted this approach for flowing forces to the region to prepare for war without upsetting the Bush administration's diplomatic efforts.

The idea was to raise pressure on Iraq until President Bush made a decision on whether or not to go to war, Mr. Rumsfeld has said.

Even some of Mr. Rumsfeld's advisers now acknowledge that they misjudged the scope and intensity of resistance from Iraqi paramilitaries in the south, and forced commanders to divert troops already stretched thin to protect supply convoys and root out Hussein loyalists in Basra, Nasiriya and Najaf.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/01/international/worldspecial/01PENT.html