Experts Say Bush-Rumsfeld's Damage to Military Will Take Years to Repair

From the Salt Lake Tribune:

Anyone else might be embarrassed when not one but two detailed studies of the way he's doing business conclude that his plans and assumptions are totally wrong, but not Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.

A recent Rand Corp. study commissioned by the Pentagon of the U.S. Army in this time of war concluded that without an increase in manpower the Army ''simply cannot sustain the force levels needed to break the back of the insurgent movement'' in Iraq.

Yet another study, conducted by the Defense Department's own Institute for Defense Analyses, concluded that the Army's Transformation program, intended to add combat brigades without boosting manpower, cuts the number of maneuver battalions in those brigades while adding more headquarters troops.

''The essence of land power is resident in the maneuver battalions that occupy terrain, control populations and fight battles, not in headquarters and enablers,'' the IDA study said. ''Yet the Army plan reduces the number of maneuver battalions by 20 percent below the number available in 2003, while increasing headquarters by 11.5 percent.''

The IDA study noted that under the Army plan, now well under way, the number of infantry battalions in infantry brigades and the number of armor battalions in armor brigades had been cut from three to two.