Rumsfeld has been getting a lot of heat over the past few days. To some degree, I buy it—the man has blown Iraq, and he shouldn’t have such a tin ear to criticism—but there is a very good reason to keep him: the military needs change, and he is changing it. It’s called RMA, or Revolution in Military Affairs: reforming defense policy to focus on future threats, not the threats of the past.

Which brings me to the Weekly Standard’s latest jab at Rumsfeld in an article by Tom Donnelly. This is the kind of stuff that makes me cringe. How can smart people have such an ahistorical outlook?

DEFENSE SECRETARY DONALD RUMSFELD’S meeting engagement with Army Specialist Thomas Wilson in Kuwait last week was not just a reality check for an arrogant and isolated Beltway bigwig. It was also, and perhaps more profoundly, an overdue reality check for what has proved in practice to be a terrible idea: military “transformation.”

Rome wasn’t built in a day (nor did it fall in a day). Imagine the naysayers who said we were losing the Cold War after just a few months, or those bozos calling Afghanistan a quagmire circa November 2001.

Changing the Army in particular is going to be a long, hard slog. But it has to be done. We need fewer tanks and more special forces. If we keep an army where infantry is the norm, we are asking for disaster in the future. Great power war is not extinct, but a duel with China over Taiwan would be fought in the air and at sea, while defending the Korea Peninsula from invasion would force the South Koreans to commit major land forces. In the 21st century, the US is facing threats from drug dealers, select rogue states, crime organizations, and other various terrorists. For that, we need a new military.

(And yes, I do know the difference between the “military” as a whole and the “army” as one division of the military. The Navy should and will remain relatively unchanged. The Air Force has been advocating this type of reform since the early 1990s. It’s the army that needs the biggest change.)

In agreeing to stay on as Defense secretary in the second Bush term, Rumsfeld has made it known that he wants to “complete the job of transformation” he has started. It would be far better if he would dedicate himself to winning the war he helped to start.

I for one don’t think these are mutually exclusive. Rumsfeld is reorganizing the military overseas: pulling out from Germany, restructuring Japan, reducing forces in Korea, and installing “lilypad” bases in countries like Georgia, Uzbekistan, and Romania. Change in this department is hard: it means straining existing alliances, ruffling feathers, and changing what currently appears to work just fine. Technology is being integrated to “empower” troops on the ground with instant information access. As for Iraq, the Army says it wants more troops for peacekeeping. Maybe that’s a valid point. But half the troops they have are sitting in Baghdad’s Green Zone.

Thus we have a Defense secretary more concerned about the Army and the force he’d like to have—the high-speed-low-drag transformed force of the future—than the force with which he actually has to fight today’s wars. And, in fact, Rumsfeld and his lieutenants would also simply like to fight the wars they’d like to have rather than the war as it is.

This, on its face, appears to be a valid criticism. But the army has to change. We have had about 120-140,000 troops throughout the occupation. We’ve had about 1,200 casulaties. Perhaps more troops would have been a better idea, but the army’s deployment is probably a bigger problem than the number of troops.

If you want to read about how the military is changing and why it must, read this interview with Robert D. Kaplan. US Special Forces are currently deployed across the globe, from Colombia to Nepal to Mongolia. Helping existing governments and reforming their militaries to take care of themselvs, not taking their place, will be the most important role for our military in the coming decades.

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