October 18, 2002	Friday	Sha'aban 11, 1423

WASHINGTON: The biggest battle facing Donald Rumsfeld is with the Army, the nation’s largest military service, which effectively has gone into opposition against the secretary of defence.

Among all the services, the Army, for institutional and historical reasons, is most skeptical of Rumsfeld’s drive to move the military into the information age. Rumsfeld has complained that the Army is too resistant to change; Army officers claim Rumsfeld doesn’t sufficiently appreciate the value of large, armoured conventional ground forces.

“Does he really hate the Army?” asked one Army officer, obviously pained by the question. “I don’t know.”

The relationship, never close, hit the rocks when Rumsfeld let it be known in April that he had decided to name Gen. John Keane, the Army’s vice chief of staff, as its next chief, 15 months before its current chief, Gen. Eric Shinseki, was scheduled to retire. This immediately made Shinseki a lame duck and undercut his ambitious “transformation” agenda, which he had set forth in late 1999.

“I do feel that this secretaryship has been very hard on this chief and has undermined his ability to bring about the kind of transformation that Shinseki envisioned,” said Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., chairman of the House Appropriations Committee’s defence subcommittee. “Clearly there’s a need for some repairing of relations between the department and the Army.”

Next, Rumsfeld killed the Army’s new mobile howitzer system, the Crusader, on grounds that it was too heavy to deploy to distant battlefields and not “transformational” enough to be relevant on the future battlefield.

Army leaders had coveted Crusader for years as a weapon system that would finally make the Army second to none in artillery firepower. They were particularly steamed at how Rumsfeld and Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz killed the system, keeping the Army in the dark until Congress was ready to vote on the fiscal 2003 budget.

In recent weeks, another dispute has arisen, with officials in Rumsfeld’s office expressing concerns about the effectiveness of the new Stryker wheeled combat vehicle designed to replace the tank in the latest Army fighting unit, called the Interim Brigade Combat Team. Stephen Cambone, Rumsfeld’s closest aide, has proposed cutting in half the Army’s plan to field six of these combat teams, saving $4.5 billion in Stryker procurement.

The Interim Brigade Combat Team is Shinseki’s bridge between the heavy Army of the Cold War and the Army of the future. But Cambone is also zeroing in on two programmes at the heart of that future Army, or Objective Force, proposing a 50 per cent cut in the Army’s Comanche helicopter and a two-year delay in fielding its Future Combat System.

But Rumsfeld’s office, aided by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., who is close to Rumsfeld and deeply interested in reforming the Army, is now questioning whether Stryker measures up.

“The mood is so morose these days” in the Army, concluded a retired general.

Army generals, already on edge, were dismayed when some Republican defence experts suggested that invading Iraq would be easy. On top of everything else, the Army now is trying to figure out how it would supply tens of thousands of troops to keep the peace in Iraq should President Saddam Hussein be ousted in a US invasion.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service.