In Defense Of Rummy...

[RandomGuy]

I respect Rumsfeld for one thing and one thing only. On 9-11, he ran from his office to the crash site at the Pentagon and was digging through debris with his bare hands for survivors. His security contingent made numerous efforts to drag him away from the danger and he would not stop, he was like a man possessed. Finally, the carried him bodily to a chopper and got him away from the Pentagon.

I have always wondered what his motive for that behavior was. Guilt? Photo op? Genuine compassion? Doubt that last one. I don't know what his motive was, but I respect his effort that day.

Other than that, he is a pompous ass, a political freak, a pure turd, and I come almost as close to hating his guts as I do George Bush's.

I agree with this assessment. Rummy got a lot of points in my book for helping to carry the stretchers, but I thought it very strange that the guy in charge of the place would do such a thing.

His actions that day, while admirable, really point out the failings of his leadership:

"nanomanagement"

He can't delegate things he should, and gets lost in details at the expense of the big picture.

Big picture was that he should have been giving orders and getting his organization (the pentagon) in gear. That is the job of leaders, and their role in organizations.

Something a former general said hits home for me: Rumsfeld fell in love with his Iraq plan and tuned out anything outside of that plan. He developed a myopia that has literally killed people.

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April 19, 2006

Here's Donny! In His Defense, a Show Is Born

By DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, April 18 — It has become a daily ritual, the defense of the defense secretary, complete with praise from serving generals, tributes from the president and, from the man on the spot, doses of charm, combativeness and even some humility.

A session on Tuesday was the third time in five days that Donald H. Rumsfeld had sought to make a public case to remain as defense secretary.

"There are no indispensable men," Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon.

But the Bush administration sought to drive home the message that Mr. Rumsfeld was not going anywhere, no matter what critics might desire.

Again, Gen. Peter Pace of the Marines, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was at Mr. Rumsfeld's side, a visual prop to counter the message from a half-dozen or so retired generals that Mr. Rumsfeld should step down.

President Bush, having defended Mr. Rumsfeld on Friday from Camp David, had appeared before the cameras hours earlier, to make the case in person.

"I'm the decider, and I decide what's best," Mr. Bush said in the Rose Garden. "And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense."

Such extended repeated public displays of self-defense are not the norm in Washington, where beleaguered officeholders usually seek to maintain the pretense that criticism does not matter. Those who do respond most often use surrogates to extol their virtues.

But the extraordinary parade of generals who have stepped forward to defend Mr. Rumsfeld includes a bevy of retired officers, including Gen. Richard B. Myers of the Air Force, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Gen. Tommy R. Franks of the Army, who commanded American troops in the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts.

On Tuesday, Mr. Rumsfeld summoned another group of retired officers for a closed meeting, ostensibly to brief them on Iraq, but clearly also to enlist their support when they appear on television.

Perhaps the most notable examples of damage control since the retired generals' complaints gathered force have come from Mr. Rumsfeld, who has appeared on Al Arabiya television, the Rush Limbaugh radio program and, twice, before television cameras at the Pentagon.

The appearances have been layered with the verbal flair, acerbic wit and defiant touches that Mr. Rumsfeld has made his trademark. But on Tuesday, there was also an uncharacteristic flash of humility — an olive twig, if not a branch — from a man better known for his combativeness.

Mr. Rumsfeld, who has said he offered to resign two times after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, said he was "not inclined to be instantaneously judgmental" about what his critics were now saying, a message that has included complaints that his headstrong style causes him to disregard much of what anyone in a uniform tells him.

"Because of the importance of these matters being discussed, I'd like to reflect on them a bit," Mr. Rumsfeld said.

Within minutes, though, he said the views of the six generals who had called for his resignation were hardly representative, noting that the nation's 6,000 or 7,000 retired generals and admirals were not "unanimous on anything."

At Mr. Rumsfeld's side, General Pace added that soldiers in Iraq showed no discernible dissatisfaction with Mr. Rumsfeld. General Pace said Gen. Michael W. Hagee, Marine Corps commandant, had just been there and reported that he "got exactly zero questions about the leadership in the department."

The calls for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation have abated since last week, when Mr. Bush asserted his authority as commander in chief to declare that Mr. Rumsfeld "has my full support and deepest appreciation."

The group that has called for the resignation includes two retired major generals who commanded troops in Iraq and a retired three-star general who was director of operations on the Joint Staff. Their comments have been criticized by other retired generals, who have said the group risks politicizing the armed forces.

A danger for Mr. Rumsfeld is that Republicans running in the November election will decide that his continued presence in the cabinet could drag down their prospects and urge Mr. Bush to dump him.

A Senate Republican aide said that despite expressions of support for Mr. Rumsfeld by some Republican senators, many other members expressed deep concern privately.

"The nervousness here is with a figure as controversial as Rumsfeld at the head of a war that's declining in popularity, that becomes a real political problem for members who are up for re-election this fall," said the aide, who insisted on anonymity because he had been told not to discuss senators' private conversations.

With Congress in recess, the aide said, he knew of no organized effort among Senate Republicans to make their concerns public or to take them to the White House. But the aide said he expected discussions to intensify when senators returned next week.

There are signs that the efforts to keep Republicans from defecting are working. On Tuesday, Representative Duncan Hunter, the California Republican who is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, issued a news release taking on Mr. Rumsfeld's critics point by point. The statement notes that the secretary had 273 meetings with senior commanders last year, illustrating "that Secretary Rumsfeld respects and relies on the judgment of the Pentagon's uniformed leadership."

After taking questions for a half-hour, Mr. Rumsfeld went to meet the retired military officers and civilian analysts. Many of those invited comment regularly on CNN, Fox News and other television and radio outlets and are part of the same community that is proving a problem for the secretary.

In past meetings with the group, Mr. Rumsfeld has opened with lengthy statements. This time he said he would go straight to questions, participants said. He was asked about the criticism, said Maj. Gen. Thomas L. Wilkerson, who retired from the Marines and who attended the meeting.

"He said it's a diversion, and that it's taken him away from the full-time focus on things he needs to do," he said. Mr. Rumsfeld "was not chastened. If anything, he looked like he was energized by it."

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting for this article.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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Roots of the Uprising

By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Tuesday, April 18, 2006; A19

Making Donald Rumsfeld the scapegoat for all that has gone wrong in Iraq is a way for other members of the administration to dodge responsibility for a misguided policy.

It makes perfect sense for a group of rebellious retired generals to demand that Rumsfeld go. The defense secretary's mistreatment of Gen. Eric Shinseki, who bravely told the truth to Congress before the invasion about how many more troops it would take to succeed in Iraq, was symptomatic of the contempt of this administration toward anyone who dared question its approach.

Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who served as a division commander in Iraq and a military aide to former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, had it exactly right last week when he explained why former soldiers were speaking up against their civilian bosses. "Civilian control is absolutely paramount," Batiste said, "but in order for it to work, there is a two-way street of respect and dialogue that has to exist." Respect and dialogue have been alien concepts to this bring-'em-on administration.

But that's also the point: For all his mistakes, Rumsfeld is not some alien creature operating as a loner sabotaging the otherwise reasonable policies of his bosses. President Bush is the commander in chief. Vice President Cheney is on record as having made outlandishly optimistic predictions before the war started about how swimmingly everything would go.

Rumsfeld is Bush's guy, which is why the president resists firing him. Letting Rumsfeld go would amount to acknowledging how badly the administration has botched Iraq.

Indeed, the rebellious generals have not confined their criticism to the secretary of defense. In his powerful article last week in Time magazine, Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold was far-reaching in saying that "the zealots' rationale for war made no sense." That was zealots , plural. He also said that our forces were committed to this fight "with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions -- or bury the results." Does anyone doubt to whom those words "casualness" and "swagger" refer?

Newbold, formerly the Pentagon's top operations officer, declared that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's "recent statement that 'we' made the 'right strategic decisions' but made thousands of 'tactical errors' is an outrage. It reflects an effort to obscure gross errors in strategy by shifting the blame for failure to those who have been resolute in fighting." In other words, if Rumsfeld goes, should Rice go too?

It's amusing to hear the administration's supporters worry that these courageous former generals are a threat to civilian control of the military. The claim reflects this administration's willingness to muster any argument it can put its hands on to silence opposition.

It's also hypocritical. Recall the opposition to President Bill Clinton's proposal to allow gays to serve in the armed forces. A certain head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff named Colin Powell publicly broke with his commander in chief in 1993 in arguing that allowing gay men and lesbians to join would undermine "good order and discipline."

Far from speaking up on behalf of Clinton's rights as the military's civilian leader, Republicans in Congress lined up with Powell and the brass. Rep. Tom DeLay said that allowing gays to serve "undermines the effectiveness of the military." (He also said it "creates health problems.") Newt Gingrich condemned Clinton for engaging in "social engineering." Sen. John McCain challenged Clinton on the basis of the new commander in chief's biography. "This president has not one day of military experience," McCain said, "so, clearly, he does not have the expertise on this issue."

The dust-up over gays in the military reflected an unfortunate fact of American political life: For decades, the top leaders of the American military have been overwhelmingly conservative and Republican in their political sympathies. I say "unfortunate" not because the brass's political views have often differed from my own but because it does not serve our military or our public life well to have the leadership of the armed forces so skewed in a single political direction. Nor does it serve liberals well to be -- or to be seen as -- reflexively hostile to the military.

And that may be the silver lining in the current cloud over Rumsfeld and our Iraq policy. Some smart and patriotic generals are telling us that a policy is not wise or respectful of our troops just because it is put forward by politicians on the right end of our political spectrum. We may be witnessing the weakening of partisanship in the top echelons of the military. That would be very good for our republic.

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© 2006 The Washington Post Company

[Nbadan]

Russert: A Source “Close to the President” Told Me Bush “Won’t Fire Rumsfeld Because It Would Be The Equivalent Of Firing Himself.”

Tim Russert revealed two very interesting pieces of information this morning on Don Imus regarding the future of Donald Rumsfeld and his standing in the Pentagon:

1. After Rep. Jack Murtha appeared on Meet the Press and advocated troop withdrawal several officials in the Pentagon called Russert to tell him “Murtha is right.”

2. A source “close to the President” told Russert that Bush “won’t fire Rumsfeld because it would be the equivalent of firing himself.”

Think Progress

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April 21, 2006
News Analysis

Criticizing an Agent of Change as Failing to Adapt

By MICHAEL R. GORDON

In defending himself against his critics, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has described himself as an agent of change and suggested that the complaints come from old thinkers who oppose reforming the military.

"Change is difficult," Mr. Rumsfeld said Tuesday. "It also happens to be urgently necessary."

It is true that since the day he arrived at the Pentagon, the defense secretary has been a man on a mission. Convinced that the generals were locked in a cold-war mindset — "legacy thinking," he dubbed it — Mr. Rumsfeld promoted the virtues of relying on precision weapons and fast-paced operations instead of huge numbers of troops.

Instead of endorsing Clinton-style nation building, Mr. Rumsfeld said the United States should rely more on the locals to shoulder the burden after "regime change."

But as a half-dozen retired Army and Marine generals have called for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation, some criticize him in his own terms. The change-agent defense secretary, they say, is resistant to change.

Mr. Rumsfeld, the critics assert, was slow to acknowledge a growing insurgency in Iraq and to counter it. The military is overstretched by the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, but Mr. Rumsfeld has also resisted expanding the Army and Marines.

Paul D. Eaton, a retired two-star Army general who used to command the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Ga., and later helped train the new Iraqi military, said in an interview, "I was stunned," when a Pentagon review did not call for enlarging the Army and Marines. General Eaton, who called for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation in March, said, "They failed to account for the contemporary operating environment."

While the conduct of the war has provoked the critics, tensions between officers and their civilian boss began long before Iraq. Mr. Rumsfeld's pursuit of his "transformation" agenda stirred some of it.

So did the manner in which he executed it, viewed by many officers as overbearing. Calling himself "genetically impatient," Mr. Rumsfeld gave a talk the day before the Sept. 11 attacks in which he said the Pentagon bureaucracy was a threat to national security.

Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army colonel who has long argued that Army leaders were unimaginative and too cautious, recalls a Rumsfeld aide's jesting that the defense secretary thought the Army's problems could be solved by lining up 50 generals and gunning them down.

Certainly, there are experts who have argued that the Pentagon has long been in need of change. Mr. Rumsfeld's agenda to reshape the military, in fact, has long been shared by President Bush.

In a 1999 speech, Mr. Bush pledged to develop light, mobile and lethal units that could be quickly deployed. He vowed to appoint a secretary of defense who would change the military structure. Once in office, Mr. Bush decided that the strong-willed Mr. Rumsfeld was the man.

The new secretary wasted no time promoting his program. He was enamored of missile defense and precision weapons. He was skeptical about the Army leadership, which he considered old-fashioned, wedded to heavy forces and slow to change. The Army was pursing its own version of transformation, but it fell short of what Mr. Rumsfeld had in mind.

Tension Developed

Some longstanding critics of the Army leadership felt they finally had an ally at the top with Mr. Rumsfeld in charge. But soon there was friction between the new defense secretary and the generals he viewed as Clinton holdovers. As the United States began to plan its Afghan operation, Gen. Hugh Shelton, an Army general who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when Mr. Rumsfeld first took up his post at the Pentagon, became concerned that Mr. Rumsfeld's transformation agenda would get a field test before the military was ready.

Days before he retired, General Shelton ran into Maj. Gen. Dell Dailey, the two-star head of the Joint Special Operations Command, in the White House parking lot. The Afghan war plan depended heavily on Special Operations forces, and General Shelton warned that the military had to resist the defense secretary's push to pare forces. Lives and the success of the mission hung in the balance, he argued.

Mr. Rumsfeld would later argue that the Afghan operation had been a major success as the United States toppled the Taliban and eliminated Al Qaeda's camps by relying on Special Operations forces, Afghan allies, air strikes — and by avoiding the commitment of substantial ground forces. Critics, though, argued that the absence of adequate American soldiers had made it easier for Osama bin Laden to escape.

By the time the Iraq war approached, Richard B. Myers, an Air Force general, had been installed as the new Joint Chiefs chairman. Mr. Rumsfeld's supporters considered General Myers and his eventual successor, Gen. Peter Pace of the Marine Corps, to be helpful in overcoming deeply entrenched ins utional resistance to transformation.

Dissent Discouraged

Critics say Mr. Rumsfeld discouraged dissent by elevating those who supported his program. "He tended to surround himself with those that support his agenda," said Maj. Gen. John Batiste, former commander of First Infantry Division and one of the retired generals who has criticized Mr. Rumsfeld. "He was involved with the selection of flag officers to an unprecedented level."

With his team in place, Mr. Rumsfeld summoned the senior military leadership to his Pentagon office in late 2001 to review the military's contingency plan for war with Iraq.

As Greg Newbold, the retired three-star general who served as chief operations deputy for the Joint Chiefs, outlined the plan, which called for as many as 500,000 troops, it was clear that Mr. Rumsfeld was increasingly irritated. He said he did not see why more than 125,000 troops would be required.

"My regret is that at the time I did not say, 'Mr. Secretary, if you try to put a number on a mission like this you may cause enormous mistakes,' " General Newbold recalled in an interview. "Give the military the task, give the military what you would like to see them do, and then let them come up with it. I was the junior military guy in the room, but I regret not saying it."

Former aides to Mr. Rumsfeld said he never told Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of the Central Command, how many troops to deploy. But Mr. Rumsfeld repeatedly asked why the force could not be smaller and deployed more quickly. He also planted ideas and sent papers — a process his aides called "suasion" — in line with his agenda. General Franks initially proposed a force of up to 385,000 troops. That number shrank as the war plan morphed from a version called the Generated Start, to the Running Start, to the Hybrid, to Cobra II. Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who was an adviser to Mr. Rumsfeld, described the discussions between General Franks and the defense secretary as one of "constant negotiation."

In a departure from typical practice, President Bush gave Mr. Rumsfeld and not the secretary of state responsibility for post-war Iraq. A month before the invasion, Mr. Rumsfeld outlined his philosophy in a speech called "Beyond Nation Building." By avoiding a large troop presence and major reconstruction, the United States would guard against the creation of a culture of dependence on the part of the Iraqis.

Eleven days after that speech, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, appeared before Congress and was asked how many troops might be required to secure post-war Iraq. His response was several hundred thousand. On Mr. Rumsfeld's instruction, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz complained about the remark to Thomas E. White, the Army secretary, the next morning. General Shinseki, Mr. Wolfowitz said, had spoken out of turn and was off base. (Mr. White dug in his heels in support of the general and was fired by Mr. Rumsfeld soon after Baghdad fell.)

Rumsfeld's Plan Different

For all of the controversy, General Shinseki's numbers were similar to those generated by the Central Command. General Franks had projected that the attack would begin with just a portion of the invasion force, which would grow to 250,000 troops by the time Saddam Hussein's force was defeated and the United States began to stabilize Iraq. There was, however, a subtle but significant difference. Secretary Rumsfeld hoped to off-ramp — that is, cancel the deployment — of some units if the Iraqi military's resistance crumbled, and he wanted to reduce the occupying force as quickly as possible.

As the war unfolded, there were enough troops to defeat the Republican Guard and take the Iraqi capital. But as American forces advanced on Baghdad, Secretary Rumsfeld pressed the question of off-ramping the First Cavalry Division, which was the final division in the war plan. General Franks went along. Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, the chief allied land war commander, was unhappy about the move, but did not protest.

The United States soon found there were not enough soldiers to control the borders, establish order in the capital or deprive the enemy of sanctuaries.

The decision of L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the occupation authority, to disband the Iraq army only added to the deficit of forces. That decision was approved by Mr. Rumsfeld. Neither Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, nor the Joint Chiefs were consulted about the decision.

For months, Mr. Rumsfeld and General Myers refrained from describing the resistance in Iraq as an insurgency. Finally, on July 16, 2003, Gen. John P. Abizaid, who succeeded General Franks at the Central Command, told a Pentagon news conference that the United States was dealing with a "classical guerrilla-type campaign."

Some former generals say that General Franks and other military leaders bear responsibility for many of the miscalculations in Iraq. Gen. Jack Keane, the former acting Army chief of staff, said that the Bush administration's aversion to nation building was wrong for Iraq. But he faults the generals, including himself, for failing to develop a comprehensive plan for a potential insurgency.

"The fact is that the Ba'athist insurgency surprised us and we had not developed a comprehensive option for dealing with this possibility," he said. "This was not just an intelligence community failure, but also our failure as senior military leaders."

In an Op-Ed article last month in The New York Times, General Eaton wrote that another factor contributed to the problems: "I have seen a climate of groupthink become dominant and a growing reluctance by experienced military men and civilians to challenge the notions of the senior leadership."

Michael R. Gordon is the chief military correspondent for The New York Times. Reporting for this article is drawn from the book "Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq," which was published by Pantheon Books. He is the co-author with Bernard E. Trainor, a retired Marine lieutenant general and former military correspondent for the newspaper.


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[ChumpDumper]

Rummy sent in just enough troops to "loose."

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April 23, 2006

Young Officers Join the Debate Over Rumsfeld

By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, April 22 — The revolt by retired generals who publicly criticized Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has opened an extraordinary debate among younger officers, in military academies, in the armed services' staff colleges and even in command posts and mess halls in Iraq.

Junior and midlevel officers are discussing whether the war plans for Iraq reflected unvarnished military advice, whether the retired generals should have spoken out, whether active-duty generals will feel free to state their views in private sessions with the civilian leaders and, most divisive of all, whether Mr. Rumsfeld should resign.

In recent weeks, military correspondents of The Times discussed these issues with dozens of younger officers and cadets in classrooms and with combat units in the field, as well as in informal conversations at the Pentagon and in e-mail exchanges and telephone calls.

To protect their careers, the officers were granted anonymity so they could speak frankly about the debates they have had and have heard. The stances that emerged are anything but uniform, although all seem colored by deep concern over the quality of civil-military relations, and the way ahead in Iraq.

The discussions often flare with anger, particularly among many midlevel officers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan and face the prospect of additional tours of duty.

"This is about the moral bankruptcy of general officers who lived through the Vietnam era yet refused to advise our civilian leadership properly," said one Army major in the Special Forces who has served two combat tours. "I can only hope that my generation does better someday."

An Army major who is an intelligence specialist said: "The history I will take away from this is that the current crop of generals failed to stand up and say, 'We cannot do this mission.' They confused the cultural can-do at ude with their responsibilities as leaders to delay the start of the war until we had an adequate force. I think the backlash against the general officers will be seen in the resignation of officers" who might otherwise have stayed in uniform for more years.

One Army colonel enrolled in a Defense Department university said an informal poll among his classmates indicated that about 25 percent believed that Mr. Rumsfeld should resign, and 75 percent believed that he should remain. But of the second group, two-thirds thought he should acknowledge errors that were made and "show that he is not the intolerant and inflexible person some paint him to be," the colonel said.

Many officers who blame Mr. Rumsfeld are not faulting President Bush — in contrast to the situation in the 1960's, when both President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara drew criticism over Vietnam from the officer corps. (Mr. McNamara, like Mr. Rumsfeld, was also resented from the outset for his attempts to reshape the military itself.)

But some are furiously criticizing both, along with the military leadership, like the Army major in the Special Forces. "I believe that a large number of officers hate Rumsfeld as much as I do, and would like to see him go," he said, summarizing conversations with other officers.

"The Army, however, went gently into that good night of Iraq without saying a word," he added. "For that reason, most of us know that we have to share the burden of responsibility for this tragedy. And at the end of the day, it wasn't Rumsfeld who sent us to war, it was the president. Officers know better than anyone else that the buck stops at the top. I think we are too deep into this for Rumsfeld's resignation to mean much.

"But this is all academic. Most officers would acknowledge that we cannot leave Iraq, regardless of their thoughts on the invasion. We destroyed the internal security of that state, so now we have to restore it. Otherwise, we will just return later, when it is even more terrible."

The debates are fueled by the desire to mete out blame for the situation in Iraq, a drawn-out war that has taken many military lives and has no clear end in sight. A midgrade officer who has served two tours in Iraq said a number of his cohorts were angered last month when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that "tactical errors, a thousand of them, I am sure," had been made in Iraq.

"We have not lost a single tactical engagement on the ground in Iraq," the officer said, noting that the definition of tactical missions is specific movements against an enemy target. "The mistakes have all been at the strategic and political levels."

Many officers said a crisis of leadership extended to serious questions about top generals' commitment to sustain a seasoned officer corps that was being deployed on repeated tours to the long-term counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the rest of the government did not appear to be on the same wartime footing.

"We are forced to develop innovative ways to convince, coerce and cajole officers to stay in to support a war effort of national-level importance that is being done without a defensewide, governmentwide or nationwide commitment of resources," said one Army officer with experience in Iraq.

Another Army major who served in Iraq said a fresh round of debates about the future of the American military had also broken out. Simply put, the question is whether the focus should be, as Mr. Rumsfeld believes, on a lean high-tech force with an eye toward to possible opponents like China, or on ground-intensive counterinsurgency missions more suited to hunting terrorists, with spies and boots on the ground.

In general, the Army and Marines support maintaining beefy ground forces, while the Navy and Air Force — the beneficiaries of much of the high-tech arsenal — favor the leaner approach. And some worry that those arguments have become too fierce.

"I think what has the potential for scarring relations is the two visions of warfare — one that envisions near-perfect situational awareness and technology dominance, and the other that sees future war as grubby, dirty and chaotic," the major said. "These visions require vastly different forces. The tension comes when we only have the money to build one of these forces, who gets the cash?"

Some senior officers said part of their own discussions were about fears for the immediate future, centering on the fact that Mr. Rumsfeld has surrounded himself with senior officers who share his views and are personally invested in his policies.

"If civilian officials feel as if they could be faced with a revolt of sorts, they will select officers who are like-minded," said another Army officer who has served in Iraq. "They will, as a result, get the military advice they want based on whom they appoint."

Kori Schake, a fellow at the Hoover Ins ution who teaches Army cadets at West Point, said some of the debates revolved around the issues raised in "Dereliction of Duty," a book that analyzes why the Joint Chiefs of Staff seemed unable or unwilling to challenge civilian decisions during the war in Vietnam. Published in 1997, the book was written by Col. H. R. McMaster, who recently returned from a year in Iraq as commander of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment.

"It's a fundamentally healthy debate," Ms. Schake said. "Junior officers look around at the senior leadership and say, 'Are these people I admire, that I want to be like?' "

These younger officers "are debating the standard of leadership," she said. "Is it good enough to do only what civilian masters tell you to do? Or do you have a responsibility to shape that policy, and what actions should you undertake if you believe they are making mistakes?"

The conflicts some officers express reflect the culture of commander and subordinate that sometimes baffles the civilian world. No class craves strong leadership more than the military.

"I feel conflicted by this debate, and I think a lot of my colleagues are also conflicted," said an Army colonel completing a year of work at one of the military's advanced schools. He expressed discomfort at the recent public airing of criticism by retired generals of Mr. Rumsfeld and the Iraq war planning.

But he said his classmates were also pointedly aware of how the Rumsfeld Pentagon quashed dissenting views that many argued were proved correct, and prescient.

In particular, he and others cited the denunciations of Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the former Army chief of staff, who was shunted aside after telling Congress that it would take several hundred thousand troops to secure and stabilize Iraq after the Saddam Hussein was toppled.

Others contend that the military's own failings are equally at fault. A field-grade officer now serving in Iraq said he thought it was incorrect for the retired generals to call for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation. His position, he said, is that "if there is a judgment to be cast, it rests as much upon the shoulders of our senior military leaders."

That officer, like several others interviewed, emphasized that while these issues often occupied officers' minds, the debate had not hobbled the military's ability to function in Iraq. "No impact here that I can see regarding this subject," he said.

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"you're doing a heckuva job, shrubbie/ ie/condi/rummy/karlie"

All of you should have known from VN NEVER to start a war of choice that wouldn't be supported majoritarily by the civilians and the military to the end, bitter or sweet.

What ing REPUG mess. May they all burn in

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