...As we've been closing bases and replacing our tanks with light SUVs. Can someone tell Rummy to put his clothes back on now?
Rumsfeld was formed by Vietnam, and like everyone whose soul is burned as a young man, he has not forgotten the lesson.
Unfortunately, the world has changed.
He came to the Pentagon on 1/21/01 to "do transformation". He was surrounded by enemies (of the bureaucratic kind), the hull was encrusted with barnacles, and he needed to kick ass and take down names to sart the transformation process.
Then 9/11 happened, and the one thing that transformation was absolutely not the right thing for-fighting a land war in Asia-was at the door.
If the US had gone down the road of creating 80-100 heavy divisions with adequate sealift and the corresponding homefront mobilization, everything Rummy came for would have been down the tubes, and more important in terms of beltwayology, all the asses he had just been kicking would have had to come back out of the grave.
Afghanistan was tactically brilliant. Iraq, however, needs MPs on every streetcorner (and now Afghanistan does, too).
The light forces which were sufficient to kick out two rag-ass governments are not sufficient to occupy and reconstruct the territory, much less do the same in Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.
So it therefore becomes a necessity that the indigenous tribes become what we need them to be - and what they most certainly are not.
We are waiting for the enemy to give up, imposing on them such force as we are willing to use.
They may not cooperate.