Rumsfeld's Wars: The Arrogance of Power.

• Author: Popescu, Ionut
• Position: Book review

Rumsfeld's Wars: The Arrogance of Power Dale R. Herspring Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2008, 247 pp.

Donald Rumsfeld will go down in history as one of the worst secretaries of defense since the end of World War II. This is the conclusion reached by Dale Herspring, a political science professor at the University of Kansas, in a new book transparently titled Rumsfeld's Wars: The Arrogance of Power. Without much effort to give the former secretary any benefit of the doubt, Herspring blames him directly for causing our military to become "demoralized" and "broken."

Herspring lays out a damning indictment of Rumsfeld's errors. He greatly harmed civil-military relations by treating our senior military officers with disrespect, by not listening to their advice, and by interfering with the traditional merit-based promotion system in order to surround himself with malleable uniformed officers while pushing out those with strong personalities like former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki. He forced the military to radically adapt to his military transformation agenda with its reliance on high-tech weapon systems at the expense of cuts in personnel, and he involved himself directly in influencing the conduct of the war in Iraq in order to prove his transformational theories--with disastrous results for that mission and consequently for our national security. As if turning military structure, tactics, operations, and weapon systems upside down were not enough, Herspring adds, Rumsfeld and his supporters successfully lobbied the administration and manipulated data to send the American armed forces off to fight a war that many generals considered unnecessary. This list of complaints represents more or less the conventional wisdom in Washington in the aftermath of Rumsfeld's troubled tenure at the Pentagon, and there is surely a lot of truth in these accusations. However, Herspring ultimately appears so willing to vilify Rumsfeld that he misses some important nuances of the two issues addressed at length in this book: military transformation and the mismanagement of the Iraq war.

It is fashionable nowadays, and largely accurate, to criticize the Rumsfeld Pentagon for its alleged infatuation with advanced technologies and futuristic weapon systems at the expense of preparing for the kinds of low-tech insurgencies faced in Afghanistan and Iraq. Herspring draws extensively on the excellent work of critics of the military...