Great minds think alike!

I was delighted to find an article by Victor Davis Hanson, a regulator contributor to the National Review Online, titled Leave Rumsfeld Be, which essentially makes the same points I made in my post The Rumsfeld apologia. In short, Hanson’s point was the same as mine: Rumsfeld is not the blame for our difficulties.

Out of sheer vanity I’m going to compare his article with my post. The following table shows Hanson most important points.

[OK, for some unknown reason, the table I created appears down below. I will debug this. For now just scroll down and I will get this nonsense fixed. Why this table is positioned where it is is a puzzle, nothing in the html justifies this]

What Hanson said:	What I said:
The Washington Post recently warned that doctors are urging [everyone] to get their flu shots before the “scarce” vaccine is thrown out. But how is such a surfeit possible when our national media scared us to death just a few months ago with the specter of a national flu epidemic, corporate malfeasance, and Bush laxity? That perfect storm of incompetence and skullduggery purportedly combined to leave us vulnerable to mass viral attack. So how can the Post now characterize something as “scarce” that is soon to be discarded for a want of takers? Was there too much or too little vaccine? The answer, of course, is the usual media-inspired flight from reason that overwhelms this country at various times — hype playing on our fears and groupthink to create a sudden story when there really is none. And now with the renewed attack on Donald Rumsfeld we are back to more of the flu-shot hysteria that has been so common in this war. Remember the pseudo-crises of the past four years — the quagmire in week three in Afghanistan or the sandstorm bog-down in Iraq?	Brilliant point. I for the record, I didn’t even think of pointing this phenomena. Hanson reminds us that the current media feeding frenzy is more about disfunctionality and unreliability internal to the media’s than about any real problems. To Hanson’s list of Media Feeding Frenzy Misfires (MFFM) I will add: (1) Baghdad Museum looting MFFM: 6,000 years of history lost. Reality: a few shards lost. (2) That the Kurd’s would secede and form Kurdistan MFFM. Reality they didn’t. (3) MFFM: That the assault on Iraq would cause a massive flood of refugees. Reality: our precision weapons were so precise and targeting so good that Baghdad residents didn’t bother to leave home; another first. (4) the Arab Street will erupt MFFM. Reality: the Arab Street, the Rip Van Winkle of geopolitics, remains asleep to this day.
according to reports, the unit in question had 784 of its 804 vehicles up-armored. Humvees are transportation and support assets that traditionally have never been so protected.	I want to add that FoxNEWS reported that, at the time the soldier asked that question, that all of the unit’s vehicles were in the process of being up-armored and the 20 or so Humvees that weren’t yet up-armored were in the shop being up-armored as that soldier asked that question of Rumsfeld. One hundred percent of that unit’s Humvees were up-armored within 24 hours of that soldier’s question being asked.
Would that World War II Sherman tanks after three years in the field had enough armor to stop a single Panzerfaust: At war's end German teenagers with cheap proto-RPGs were still incinerating Americans in their “Ronson Lighters.” Second, being unprepared in war is, tragically, nothing new. It now seems near criminal that Americans fought in North Africa with medium Stuart tanks, whose 37-millimeter cannons (“pea-shooters” or “squirrel guns”) and thin skins ensured the deaths of hundreds of GIs. Climbing into Devastator torpedo bombers was tantamount to a death sentence in 1942; when fully armed and flown into a headwind, these airborne relics were lucky to make 100 knots — not quite as bad as sending fabric Brewster Buffaloes up against Zeros. Yet FDR and George Marshall, both responsible for U.S. military preparedness, had plenty of time to see what Japan and Germany were doing in the late 1930s. Under the present logic of retrospective perfection, both had years to ensure our boys adequate planes and tanks — and thus should have resigned when the death toll of tankers and pilots soared. Even by 1945 both the Germans and the Russians still had better armor than the Americans. In the first months of Korea, our early squadrons of F-80s were no match for superior Mig-15s. Early-model M-16 rifles jammed with tragic frequency in Vietnam. The point is not to excuse the military naiveté and ill-preparedness that unnecessarily take lives, but to accept that the onslaught of war is sometimes unforeseen and its unfolding course persistently unpredictable. Ask the Israelis about the opening days of the Yom Kippur War, when their armor was devastated by hand-held Soviet-made anti-tank guns and their vaunted American-supplied air force almost neutralized by SAMs — laxity on the part of then perhaps the world's best military a mere six years after a previous run-in with Soviet-armed Arab enemies.	Historical commentary: the Russian RPG was modeled on a WW II German anti-tank weapon, the Panzerfaust. The German word Panzerfaust literally means tank fist. While I’m not the best person to translate German, I believe that a free translation of Panzerfaust would be something like Tank Puncher. In any case, the Russians recognized the merits of the Panzerfaust and created a Russianized version of the Panzerfaust, the Rocket Propelled Grenade (i.e., the RPG) in 1962. In my post I barely alluded to how perfectly inferior the WW II U.S. Sherman tank was. It was so undergunned that it could only kill German Panzers by targeting the thinner armor located on the Panzer’s aft end. Underarmored such that Panzer tanks routinely scored first round kills. The U.S. won armor battles by drowning the Germans with superior numbers of inferior tanks. The U.S. cannot blame her wretched designed tanks on wartime haste. The 1958 vintage M60 was cobbled together from two earlier tank designs. Of course scavenging inferior old designs to design the M60 yielded an yet another inferior tank. The U.S. depended to the M60 for 20 years until the Abrams M1 began being fielded in the 1980s. The U.S. voluntarily tolerated god-awful tanks for over 40 years!
the demand for Rumsfeld's scalp is also predicated on supposedly too few troops in the theater. But here too the picture is far more complicated. Vietnam was no more secure with 530,000 American soldiers in 1968 than it was with 24,000 in 1972. How troops are used, rather than their sheer numbers, is the key to the proper force deployment — explaining why Alexander the Great could take a Persian empire of 2 million square miles with an army less than 50,000, while earlier Xerxes with 500,000 on land and sea could not subdue tiny Greece, one-fortieth of Persia's size.	Here Hanson make another excellent point that I didn’t even consider making.
if the argument can be made that Rumsfeld was responsible for either disbanding the Iraqi army or the April stand-down from Fallujah — the latter being the worst American military decision since Mogadishu — then he deserves our blame. But so far, from what we know, the near-fatal decision to pull-back from Fallujah was made from either above Rumsfeld (e.g., the election-eve White House) or below him (Paul Bremmer and the Iraqi provisional government).	I also made the point that what I regarded as the biggest errors of the war were disbanding the military and firing all of the Baathists from government. Hanson partly agrees with me on.
In truth, the real troop problem transcends Iraq. Our shortages are caused by a military that was slashed after the Cold War and still hasn't properly recouped to meet the global demands of the war against Islamic fascism — resulting in rotation nightmares, National Guard emergencies, and stop-order controversies.	I had pointed out that today’s troop shortages were caused by Clinton’s “reinventing government” military cuts. Hanson makes an additional point—one I didn’t make—that the military’s Cold War configuration that depends on the National Guard for any major war needs to be redesigned for today’s war on Islamofascists.
[Rumsfeld] has carefully allotted troops in Iraq because he has few to spare elsewhere — and all for reasons beyond his control. If Senator Lott or kindred pundits first show us exactly where the money is to come from to enlarge the military (tax hikes, cuts in new Medicare entitlements, or budgetary freezes?), and, second, that Mr. Rumsfeld opposes expanding our defense budget — “No, President Bush, I don't need any more money, since the Clinton formula was about right for our present responsibilities” — then he should be held responsible. So far that has not happened.	I made a similar point that budgetary constraints make it difficult to reverse the Clinton military cuts. I wonder if reversing these cuts will cost us more than the cuts save us?
have we forgotten what Mr. Rumsfeld did right? Not just plenty, but plenty of things that almost anyone else would not have done. Does anyone think the now-defunct Crusader artillery platform would have saved lives in Iraq or helped to lower our profile in the streets of Baghdad? How did it happen that our forces in Iraq are the first army in our history to wear practicable body armor? And why are over 95 percent of our wounded suddenly surviving — at miraculous rates that far exceeded even those in the first Gulf War? If the secretary of Defense is to be blamed for renegade roguery at Abu Ghraib or delays in up-arming Humvees, is he to be praised for the system of getting a mangled Marine to Walter Reed in 36 hours? And who pushed to re-deploy thousands of troops out of Europe, and to re-station others in Korea? Or were we to keep ossified bases in perpetuity in the logic of the Cold War while triangulating allies grew ever-more appeasing to our enemies and more gnarly to us, their complacent protectors? The blame with this war falls not with Donald Rumsfeld. We are more often the problem — our mercurial mood swings and demands for instant perfection devoid of historical perspective about the tragic nature of god-awful war. Our military has waged two brilliant campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. There has been an even more inspired postwar success in Afghanistan where elections were held in a country deemed a hopeless Dark-Age relic. A thousand brave Americans gave their lives in combat to ensure that the most wicked nation in the Middle East might soon be the best, and the odds are that those remarkable dead, not the columnists in New York, will be proven right — no thanks to post-facto harping from thousands of American academics and insiders in chorus with that continent of appeasement Europe. [..] Donald Rumsfeld is no Les Aspin or William Cohen, but a rare sort of secretary of the caliber of George Marshall. … we will regret it immediately if we drive this proud and honest-speaking visionary out of office, even as his hard work and insight are bringing us ever closer to victory.

the end