History > 2006 > USA > Pentagon (I)

Pentagon Seeks Nonnuclear Tip for Sub Missiles

May 29, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON

WASHINGTON, May 28 — The Pentagon is pressing Congress to approve the development of a new weapon that would enable the United States to carry out nonnuclear missile strikes against distant targets within an hour.

The proposal has set off a complex debate about whether this program for strengthening the military's conventional capacity could increase the risks of accidental nuclear confrontation.

The Pentagon plan calls for deploying a nonnuclear version of the submarine-launched Trident II missile that could be used to attack terrorist camps, enemy missile sites, suspected caches of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons and other potentially urgent threats, military officials say.

If fielded, it would be the only nonnuclear weapon designed for rapid strikes against targets thousands of miles away and would add to the president's options when considering a pre-emptive attack.

Gen. James E. Cartwright, the chief of the United States Strategic Command, said the system would enhance the Pentagon's ability to "pre-empt conventionally" and precisely while limiting the "collateral damage." The program would cost an estimated half a billion dollars over five years, and the Pentagon is seeking $127 million in its current spending request to Congress to begin work.

But the plan has run into resistance from lawmakers who are concerned that it may increase the risk of an accidental nuclear confrontation. The Trident II missile that would be used for the attacks is a system that has long been equipped with a nuclear payload. Indeed, both nonnuclear and nuclear-tipped variants of the Trident II missile would be loaded on the same submarines under the Pentagon plan.

"There is great concern this could be destabilizing in terms of deterrence and nuclear policy," said Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee. "It would be hard to determine if a missile coming out a Trident submarine is conventional or nuclear."

Reflecting the worry that Russia and other nations might misinterpret the launch of a nonnuclear Trident as the opening salvo in a nuclear barrage, lawmakers have insisted that the Bush administration present a plan to minimize that risk before the new weapon is manufactured and deployed.

The program to develop a conventional version of the Trident II missile was foreshadowed in the Nuclear Posture Review, a classified study the Pentagon carried out in 2001. The study urged that nonnuclear systems be added to the existing triad of long-range nuclear air, land and sea forces — a concept that the military nicknamed "Global Strike."

The Strategic Command, which oversees the long-range nuclear weapons in the United States arsenal, was given the responsibility to figure out a way to develop such a capability. In 2004, General Cartwright, a Marine officer, was appointed to head the command.

In looking for a new weapon, General Cartwright said, his goal was a nonnuclear system that could respond to a threat in no more than an hour, including the time that would be needed to secure the president's authorization to attack.

"We have laid out in the construct the idea of an hour," General Cartwright said in an interview.

Neither bombers nor cruise missiles met General Cartwright's requirement because he reasoned that the threat might emerge in a region where the United States lacked bases or had few or no forces. It can take days for the United States to move aircraft and ships into a crisis zone and position them to strike. Bombers can attack remote targets from the United States or bases abroad, but it takes many hours to conduct such a mission.

So the Strategic Command developed a plan to fit conventional warheads on existing Trident II ballistic missiles. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has wholeheartedly supported the idea, and the Pentagon wants to field the system in two years.

In justifying the program to lawmakers, General Cartwright outlined a number of potential situations. "The argument for doing it is that there are instances, fairly rare, when time is so critical that if you can't strike in an hour or so you are going to miss that opportunity," said Representative Roscoe G. Bartlett, the Maryland Republican who is chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Projection Forces and who is still weighing whether to support the plan.

One possible situation, Mr. Bartlett said, would be "people putting together some terrorist weapon, and while they are putting it together we can take it out, and if we miss that opportunity it may show up on the streets of New York City or Washington, D.C."

Still another might involve the need to destroy an enemy missile equipped with a chemical, biological or nuclear warhead before an adversary can launch it at the United States or its allies. Another would be fresh intelligence about a meeting of terrorists.

Given the considerable American military presence in Iraq, Afghanistan and South Korea, some critics say the circumstances in which a target may be beyond the reach of American warplanes or armed Predator drones are few indeed. Acquiring the sort of precise intelligence that would give the president enough confidence to order the launch of a ballistic missile within an hour might also be a daunting proposition.

General Cartwright said that the weapon would give the president an option to respond quickly to the sort of immediate dangers that are most likely to become more common in the 21st century without taking the drastic step of resorting to a nuclear-armed ballistic missile.

A major issue, however, is whether the Pentagon will prepare for new threats at the risk of aggravating old nuclear risks. Under the Pentagon plan, each Trident submarine would carry two of the nonnuclear Trident II missiles along with 22 nuclear-armed Trident missiles. Each of the nonnuclear missiles would carry four nonexplosive warheads. Two types of warheads would be developed. One type would be a metal slug that would land with such tremendous force it could smash a building. The other type of warhead would be a flechette bomb, which would disperse tungsten rods to destroy vehicles and less well-protected targets over a broader area.

As currently configured, the weapon would not have the capability to destroy facilities that are buried deeply underground. The system would use satellite tracking to improve its accuracy. General Cartwright asserted that a test demonstrated that a nonnuclear version of the missile could fly thousands of miles and deliver its payload just five yards away from its target.

Two former defense secretaries, James R. Schlesinger and Howard Brown, weighed in with an op-ed article last week in The Washington Post, urging the Congress to support the system.

The worry about Russia centers on whether that country could distinguish the launch of a Trident II from a nuclear strike, especially since its early warning network has deteriorated since the collapse of the Soviet Union. There is also some concern about China, which has a meager capability to detect incoming ballistic missiles.

"For nations like China that have a developing capability and are not totally blind but can see just a little, what would you see?" Mr. Bartlett asked. "We need to be cognizant of the potential for people to misunderstand what they would see."

The Senate Armed Services Committee has insisted that the administration report on how it would mitigate such risks before money can be spent to manufacture or deploy the missiles.

In a parallel move, the House Armed Services Committee has asked Mr. Rumsfeld to report on discussions that have been held with other nations on this issue and to provide a detailed explanation of how the weapons would be used. The House committee also sought to slow the program by cutting most of the funds sought for the research and development of the new warhead.

General Cartwright said a number of measures could be taken to reduce the risk of miscalculation. One step would be to notify Russia and other nations when the United States launched a conventional Trident II missile. Another, he said, would be allowing foreign nations to monitor tests of the system.

"We are going to put a target area in the ocean so people can actually see what it looks like when it hits the earth and don't confuse this with a mushroom cloud," he said.

General Cartwright said the United States was examining whether the missile could be launched from parts of the ocean that would not put the missile on a trajectory toward Russian territory. The United States has also pushed for an American-Russian center where early warning data could be shared. But the talks over that proposal are bogged down.

Arms control experts are divided over the wisdom of the plan. Steve Andreasen, a former defense specialist for the National Security Council, said the program would undermine American security by eliminating the taboo about the use of long-range missiles and diverting funds from other pressing defense needs.

"Long-range ballistic missiles have never been used in combat in 50 years," Mr. Andreasen said. "Once the U.S. starts signaling that it views these missiles as no different than any other weapon, other nations will adopt the same logic."

Bruce Blair, the president of the World Security Institute and a former Minuteman missile launch control officer, said the weapon would continue a welcome trend toward substituting conventional weapons for nuclear systems, assuming that adequate safeguards can be worked out to avoid the risk of inadvertent nuclear confrontation.

"They make a lot more sense than 14 subs loaded to the gills with nuclear-armed Trident missiles in this day and age," Mr. Blair said.

The Russians, for their part, seem to have little interest in facilitating Congressional approval of a new American weapons system. During his recent trip to Russia, General Cartwright sought to explain the rationale for program to General Yuri Baluyevski, the chief of the Russian General Staff.

"The things that I tried to talk to him about were the common issues that we face — the fact that terrorists and organizations are getting capabilities that are significant and are likely to stay on a trend that could be associated with weapons of mass destruction," General Cartwright said.

After that discussion, General Baluyevski continued to stir up opposition to the plan. "As our American colleagues often tell us, these missiles could be used to kill bin Laden," he told reporters earlier this month. "This could be a costly move which not only won't guarantee his destruction but could provoke an irreversible response from a nuclear-armed state which can't determine what warhead is fitted on the missile."

    Pentagon Seeks Nonnuclear Tip for Sub Missiles, NYT, 29.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/29/washington/29strike.html?hp&ex=1148875200&en=d696a8c72b07575e&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Military recruiters lure extreme sports thrill seekers

Updated 5/23/2006 11:06 PM ET
USA Today
By Tom Vanden Brook

LAS VEGAS — The Air Force is turning toward extreme sports enthusiasts to fill a shortage of special operations troops.

The Air Force needs combat air traffic controllers to go behind enemy lines to set up airfields and call in airstrikes and trauma specialists to skydive into hostile territory to rescue wounded troops.

To be fully staffed, the Air Force needs 426 combat controllers. It has 350. A full complement of pararescuers is 123; there are 90.

That's one reason why recruiters visited a motocross race here to find athletic adrenaline junkies willing to serve.

Dozens of dirt bikes whine and speed and spray dirt as they soar over jumps. The crowd is young.

"It's a good match for us," says Wayne Norrad, who's manning a recruiting booth at the Amp'd Mobile Supercross race. "We're looking for a person who likes a little adrenaline rush. Thrill seekers."

The aim isn't to sign up athletes on the spot. Instead, recruiters collect the names and numbers of those interested in talking to them later.

All military special operations forces are expanding. Since 2002, the U.S. Special Operations Command has added 6,000 people and almost doubled its budget, according to the Pentagon. There are about 17,000 special operations troops in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.

"There's going to be a need for these guys over the long term," says Col. Bill Sherman, 46, of the Air Force's Special Operations Command.

Two-thirds of applicants to the Air Force special operations forces wash out, Norrad says.

The Air Force also must compete with better-known outfits, such as the Navy SEALs, who also need more recruits. Navy records show that elite unit is 12% below full strength.

The military wants to keep the special operators it already has; last year, it started offering a $150,000 bonus to 19-year veterans who re-enlist for six more years.

Air Force special operations recruiters have been to 10 Supercross races this year with an exhibit featuring satellite communications equipment, a rugged laptop and a dirt bike.

"It looked pretty cool, cruising around on dirt bikes, calling in bombs," says Darren Godber, 19, of Glendora, Calif.

    Military recruiters lure extreme sports thrill seekers, UT, 23.5.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-05-23-extreme-recruiting_x.htm

Autopsy Finds That Soldier Under Army Medical Care Died From Painkiller Overdose

May 19, 2006
The New York Times
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

HOUSTON, May 18 — An injured Army recruit who died while under medical treatment at Fort Sill, in Lawton, Okla., succumbed to an accidental overdose of the powerful narcotic painkiller fentanyl, according to a military autopsy report released to the family on Thursday. But a fellow soldier said he had warned the Army that the recruit had been abusing the drug.

The death was the second drug fatality in two years in the Physical Training and Rehabilitation Program, which is intended to treat new recruits who are injured in basic training. Last week, The New York Times reported that the Army had shaken up the therapy program after repeated complaints from soldiers and their parents that injured recruits were punished with physical abuse and medical neglect.

The autopsy report, by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, found that the soldier, Pfc. Mathew Scarano, 21, of Eureka, Calif., died the night of March 18-19 from a blood concentration of fentanyl of 0.09 milligrams per liter, at least three times the fatal dosage cited in medical studies, the report said. "The manner of death is accident," it concluded.

Col. William L. Greer, Fort Sill's chief of staff, said in a telephone interview on Thursday that Private Scarano appeared to have abused the medication by removing a three-day skin patch he had been given and eating the fentanyl. While the investigation has not yet been formally closed, Colonel Greer said, "the death will be ruled an accident based on oral ingestion of the patch." He defended the medical procedures as proper. "I'm not sure how we could have prevented that," he said.

But a fellow soldier who was also in the therapy unit, and has since been medically discharged from the Army, said he knew that Private Scarano had been ingesting fentanyl from the skin patch, and had told Army doctors about it.

"I told doctors he was not using the medication the way he should have," said the former soldier, Clayton Howell. "But I don't know why they didn't do anything."

Private Scarano's mother, Christen Scarano-Bailey, said the findings left crucial questions unanswered. "It was negligence or improperly prescribed," she said in a telephone interview. "I think the Army was at fault."

Jon Long, the Army spokesman at Fort Sill, said the Criminal Investigation Division Command at the post was completing its inquiry into the death. Though the Army declined to release the autopsy report, a copy was provided by Ms. Scarano-Bailey.

In the Army shake-up of the program, one drill sergeant was disciplined and reassigned after soldiers said he had kicked an injured recruit, and another was reassigned after soldiers said he had ordered medicated soldiers repeatedly awakened during the night.

Among the changes in the programs nationwide, commanders said, were closer control of medications. A six-month limit on stays in the recuperation program would also be enforced, they said.

On Monday, the under secretary of the Army, Pete Geren, was at Fort Sill on what the Army called a previously planned visit to discuss base realignments. Mr. Geren visited the therapy unit and talked to soldiers, and "recommended that the lessons learned at Fort Sill be shared with the Army's other P.T.R.P. sites," said a Pentagon spokeswoman, Betsy J. Weiner.

Private Scarano had been in and out of the unit for more than a year, after he injured his groin and then hurt his shoulder falling off a rappelling tower, his family said. He was adamantly against having Army surgeons operate on his shoulder, he wrote in letters home. But he was dedicated to the Army, friends said, and planned to re-enlist if he could get out long enough to have his shoulder repaired at a civilian hospital.

Ms. Scarano-Bailey said that when she last saw her son, on a Christmas furlough, he showed no signs of drug dependency and, though in pain from his shoulder, took nothing stronger than Tylenol.

Other soldiers in the therapy program said in recent interviews that they thought Private Scarano showed signs of overmedication.

"I can't remember ever seeing him conscious after 6:30 p.m.," said Pvt. Justin Nugent, 21, of Candor, N.Y. He said that Private Scarano had to be awakened earlier than the others because it took him longer to shake off sleep and that he might have taken unauthorized extra medications, not realizing that doctors had already increased his dosage.

Pvt. Richard Thurman, now out of the unit, said Private Scarano had often been so "doped up" that "somebody would have to hold him up when he walked to final formation," and that his medication schedule was adjusted so that he would get his dosage only after the evening formation.

Private Thurman said that the night before Private Scarano died, he was lying in his bunk on his back and that soldiers who knew it was an uncomfortable position for him rolled him onto his stomach. He was found dead the next morning.

"What we felt is that the P.T.R.P. did this to him," Private Thurman said, "and that the system itself was flawed."

    Autopsy Finds That Soldier Under Army Medical Care Died From Painkiller Overdose, NYT, 19.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/19/us/19training.html

Military Plans Tests in Search for an Alternative to Oil-Based Fuel

May 14, 2006
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON, May 13 — When an F-16 lights up its afterburners, it consumes nearly 28 gallons of fuel per minute. No wonder, then, that of all the fuel the United States government uses each year, the Air Force accounts for more than half. The Air Force may not be in any danger of suffering inconveniences from scarce or expensive fuel, but it has begun looking for a way to power its jets on something besides conventional fuel.

In a series of tests — first on engines mounted on blocks and then with B-52's in flight — the Air Force will try to prove that the American military can fly its aircraft by blending traditional crude-oil-based jet fuel with a synthetic liquid made first from natural gas and, eventually, from coal, which is plentiful and cheaper.

While the military has been a leader in adopting some technologies — light but strong metals, radar-evading stealth designs and fire-retardant flight suits, for example — any effort to hit a miles-per-gallon fuel efficiency rating has taken a back seat when the mission is to haul bombs farther and faster or push 70-ton tanks across a desert to topple an adversary. (The Abrams tank, for example, gets less than a mile per gallon under certain combat conditions.)

"Energy is a national security issue," said Michael A. Aimone, the Air Force assistant deputy chief of staff for logistics.

The United States is unlikely ever to become fully independent of foreign oil, Mr. Aimone said, but the intent of the Air Force project is "to develop enough independence to have assured domestic supplies for aviation purposes."

By late this summer, on the hard lake beds of the Mojave Desert, where the Air Force tests its most secret and high-performance aircraft, a lumbering B-52 is scheduled to take off in an experiment in which two of the giant bomber's engines will burn jet fuel produced not from crude oil but from natural gas. The plane's six other engines will burn traditional jet fuel — just in case.

The Air Force consumed 3.2 billion gallons of aviation fuel in fiscal year 2005, which was 52.5 percent of all fossil fuel used by the government, Pentagon statistics show. The total Air Force bill for jet fuel last year topped $4.7 billion.

Although the share of national energy consumption by the federal government and the military is just 1.7 percent, every increase of $10 per barrel of oil drives up Air Force fuel costs by $600 million per year.

Mr. Aimone said that if the synthetic blend worked, plans called for increasing its use in Air Force planes to 100 million gallons in the next two years.

Air Force and industry officials say that oil prices above $40 to $45 per barrel make a blend with synthetic fuels a cost-effective alternative to oil-based jet fuel.

Fuel costs have doubled since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and crude oil prices since Hurricane Katrina have remained above $60 a barrel.

The Air Force effort falls under a directive from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to explore alternative fuel sources. Under the plan, the Air Force has been authorized to buy 100,000 gallons of synthetic fuel.

Ground experiments are scheduled to begin in coming weeks at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, followed by test flights at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

Although the Air Force is leading the project, it is working with the Automotive Tank Command of the Army, in Detroit, and the Naval Fuels Laboratory, at Patuxent River, Md.

The research and tests on synthetic fuel would ultimately produce a common fuel for the entire military, Air Force officials said.

The initial contract for unconventional fuel for the tests will be signed with Syntroleum Corporation of Tulsa, Okla., which has provided synthetic fuel for testing by the Departments of Energy, Transportation and Defense since 1998.

John B. Holmes Jr., Syntroleum's president and chief executive officer, said his firm would sell the Air Force its synthetic fuel for testing "at our cost, and we may be losing a little bit."

Neither Mr. Holmes nor the Air Force would provide cost estimates for the experimental fuel deal in advance of signing a final contract, expected in coming days.

Air Force officials have acknowledged, however, that the cost per gallon of the test fuel will be expensive.

Syntroleum can produce 42 gallons of synthetic fuel from 10,000 cubic feet of natural gas. The raw materials cost about $70.

If the military moves ahead with using the synthetic fuels, the Syntroleum technology could be used by factories elsewhere to produce the same 42 gallons of fuel from just $10 worth of coal, Mr. Holmes said.

"The United States is essentially the Saudi Arabia of coal," Mr. Holmes said. "It can be mined relatively inexpensively. We really believe that one of the things we can do to help our country's energy needs is to use the abundance of coal reserves."

Mr. Aimone said the large plants needed to produce nonconventional fuels did not exist and would have to be designed and built by the industry.

But he added: "We believe there are economic incentives as we invest in this, and invest with the industry at large, because there are vast coal reserves in this country. The economic pressures of rising oil prices can be moderated by the price of coal."

    Military Plans Tests in Search for an Alternative to Oil-Based Fuel, NYT, 14.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/us/14fuel.html?hp&ex=1147665600&en=e02781ed4fbe50e8&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Pentagon Exploring Border Control Patrols

May 11, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:50 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Pentagon is looking at ways the military can help provide more security along the U.S. southern border, defense officials said Thursday, once again drawing the nation's armed forces into a politically sensitive domestic role.

Paul McHale, the assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense, asked officials this week to come up with options for the use of military resources and troops -- particularly the National Guard -- along the border with Mexico, according to defense officials familiar with the discussions. The officials, who requested anonymity because the matter has not been made public, said there are no details yet on a defense strategy.

The request comes as some Southern lawmakers met this week with White House strategist Karl Rove for a discussion that included making greater use of National Guard troops to shore up border control. Congress is poised to pass legislation this month that would call for additional border security, a new guest worker program and provisions opening the way to eventual citizenship for many of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the country.

''The Texas delegation is very concerned about the border and are pushing urgency,'' said Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, who joined other Texas Republicans in a meeting with Rove this week. He said Rove was ''very forthright'' about border projects that Homeland Security is starting up, its current projects and what the needs are.

Rep. Ken Marchant, R-Texas, who also attended the meeting, said the lawmakers left ''very encouraged.''

Currently, the military plays a very limited role along the borders, but some armed forces have been used in the past to help battle drug traffickers. National Guard units, meanwhile, have been used at time by Southern and Western governors to provide assistance at border crossings.

Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano said the military help ''is basically what she has been asking for,'' spokeswoman Jeanine L'Ecuyer said. Napolitano has been asking the Pentagon to send more National Guard troops -- but not regular military -- to confront illegal immigration from Mexico. About 170 National Guard troops are helping in such efforts in the state now.

Similarly, Texas Gov. Rick Perry hadn't specifically requested assistance from the military, but he liked the idea, according to spokeswoman Kathy Walt. ''The assets are stretched thin, at least in Texas, because of the war on terror,'' she said. ''The governor would welcome any effort by the federal government in meeting its responsibility to secure our border.''

Defense officials said they have been asked to map out what military resources could be made available if needed -- including options for using the National Guard under either state or federal control. The strategy would also explore the legal guidelines for use of the military on domestic soil, the officials said.

On Capitol Hill on Thursday, the House voted 252-171 to allow Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to assign military personnel under certain circumstances to help the Homeland Security Department with border security. The House added the provision to a larger military measure.

The National Guard is generally under the control of the state governors, but Guard units can be federalized by the president, such as those sent to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Active duty military cannot be used for law enforcement unless the president specifically decides to exercise that option.

Officials wrangled over the use of the active military during Hurricane Katrina, with some suggesting that troops be used for law enforcement to quell violence and looters in New Orleans. There were also suggestions that Bush federalize the National Guard there -- removing them from state control, but state officials opposed that proposal. In the end, neither move was made.

At its peak during Katrina, the military had about 22,000 active-duty troops in the Gulf region, along with about 50,000 National Guard troops operating under the state governors' command. The active- duty military provided ships, helicopters, search-and-rescue aid, evacuations and other assistance.

In the aftermath of the hurricane, Bush asked Pentagon officials to review ways to give the military a bigger role in responding to major disasters. But officials are somewhat reluctant to make major changes, leery of the image of armed military troops patrolling U.S. cities.

Under the Civil War-era Posse Comitatus Act, federal troops are prohibited from performing law enforcement actions, such as making arrests, seizing property or searching people. In extreme cases, however, the president can invoke the Insurrection Act, also from the Civil War, which allows him to use active-duty or National Guard troops for law enforcement.

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Associated Press writers Suzanne Gamboa and Liz Sidoti contributed to this report.

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On the Net:

Defense Department: http://www.defenselink.mil

    Pentagon Exploring Border Control Patrols, NYT, 11.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Border-Defense.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Army Acts to Curb Abuses of Injured Recruits

May 12, 2006
The New York Times
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

LAWTON, Okla. — The Army has shaken up a program to heal recruits injured in basic training after soldiers and their parents said troops hurt at Fort Sill were punished with physical abuse and medical neglect.

The program, which treated more than 1,100 injured soldiers last year at five posts, normally returns three-fourths of its patients to active duty, according to Army statistics. But at Fort Sill, recruits said, injuries were often subject to derision, ignored or improperly treated.

Two soldiers in the program have died since 2004, one or possibly both of accidental overdoses of prescription drugs. The latest death, in March, remains under investigation, the Army said.

"I am an inmate," one soldier, Pfc. Mathew Scarano of Eureka, Calif., wrote in a letter home in January two months before he died. "I sometimes ask those friends of mine with jailhouse tattoos if they'd rather be back in jail, or here. So far, they are unanimous — jail."

Commanders acknowledge problems with the Physical Training and Rehabilitation Program, and they have ordered changes here at the Field Artillery Center and at the other training centers. For the first time, as a result of the Fort Sill problems, a medical professional is to head each program.

A civilian spokesman at the fort, Jon Long, said an investigation had substantiated "misbehavior" by a drill sergeant who, soldiers say, kicked a trainee with stitches in his knee. Mr. Long said the sergeant had been suspended and reassigned, along with another drill sergeant who, soldiers complained, had repeatedly awakened injured trainees throughout the night for uniform changes and formations.

The events, after a drill sergeant's bribery scandal last year and a drug sting that ensnared 12 soldiers, have thrown a cloud over Fort Sill, one of the centers for nine weeks of basic training where volunteers first report on the way to Iraq or elsewhere. G.I.'s who fall prey to sprains and fractures and cannot complete the often grueling passage to "warrior" are sent to the Physical Training and Rehabilitation Program, where a motto reads "Heal and Ship."

Soldiers' blogs reflect dissatisfaction at some of the other programs, too, but Lt. Col. Michael Russell, command psychologist at the Training and Doctrine Command in Fort Monroe, Va., who was involved in the new therapy, said just Fort Sill had had a fatality or major complaints. The other sites are Fort Benning, Ga.; Fort Jackson, S.C.; Fort Knox, Ky.; and Fort Leonard Wood, Mo.

"Of course, we take anything like that very seriously," Colonel Russell said. "We're going to put medical people in charge." At Fort Sill, an artillery captain has been in charge.

The Army now limits treatments to six months, with evaluations after three months and then monthly.

In interviews, soldiers and parents said injured troops regularly suffered punitive treatment as malingerers, although many had joined specifically to serve in Iraq.

A trainee with a broken finger who was described by fellow soldiers as frustrated by indifferent treatment, slashed himself with a razor, smeared himself with feces and walked around naked, the Army confirmed. Regarded as faking illness, he was returned to his unit to finish training.

Soldiers in the 40-member unit said their injuries often went unattended in stays that exceeded six months and worsened while they waited to see specialists in short supply because of medical needs in Iraq.

"I don't want to say cruel and unusual punishment, but that's what it was," said Tom Nugent of Candor, N.Y., near Ithaca. His son Pvt. Justin Nugent has had two operations since a shoulder "popped out" after push-ups in July.

Another parent, Steven Howell, an aide to Representative Mark Souder, Republican of Indiana, said he and his wife had complained about the treatment of their son Clayton, who has spent a year in the "limbo" of the program after a gallbladder attack. "My main concern as a parent is that medical issues are not being addressed properly," Mr. Howell said.

One mother critical of the war who had an injured son in the unit and another son serving in Iraq, appealed to Amnesty International and members of Congress for help. The mother, Patricia deVarennes, from outside Sarasota, Fla., brought to light the complaints about her son Pfc. Richard Thurman by posting them on her blog, along with Private Scarano's final e-mail messages.

They were then reported in a March issue of a biweekly left-wing newsletter, CounterPunch.

"The supreme irony," said Ms. deVarennes, a writer and computer specialist, "is that I was more worried about my son at Fort Sill than the one in Iraq."

Colonel Russell credited Ms. deVarennes with bringing the problems to his attention.

In e-mail responses to questions, Mr. Long, the Fort Sill spokesman, confirmed that an investigation focused on accusations of physical and verbal abuse. He declined to discuss details because no one had been charged with a crime. But Mr. Long said the initial findings did substantiate the reports of misbehavior by the drill sergeant, who was said to have kicked the soldier and who along with another drill sergeant received "administrative disciplinary action."

The findings, Mr. Long said, also pointed to "command climate issues" that allowed cursing at injured soldiers. He said none of the physical or verbal abuse had been directed at Private Scarano or was involved with his death. Mr. Long said it might be weeks before a toxicology report provided an official cause of death.

He said that in July 2004 a private in the program was found to have died from "acute methadone intoxication" after an accidental overdose.

Fort Sill, where up to 15,000 troops a year are trained and sent to active duty, had already been brushed by problems. In January 2005, a longtime drill sergeant was convicted of taking bribes to guarantee that recruits would pass basic training.

In October, the first of 12 present and former soldiers at the post were caught in an F.B.I. sting and charged with conspiring to guard cocaine shipments while in uniform.

The fort commander, Maj. Gen. David C. Ralston, said he was confident that the leadership of the healing program took the correct actions after a thorough investigation. General Ralston said he was pleased with the improvements at Fort Sill, where the success rate was 75 percent, one of the highest for the training centers.

"Although this is a very good track record," the general added, "there will always be challenges to taking so many young adults and giving them the rigorous training they need to serve successfully in our nation's Army and to win on the battlefield."

In letters home, Private Scarano, who severely injured his shoulder in a fall in training, said he was wearing a patch with the painkiller fentanyl, which he called "80 times stronger than heroin," and also wrote: "The Army has me on Ambien, seroquel, tylox and oxycontins. I also get trazadone to take the edge off."

At that time, Mr. Long said, soldiers were not monitored while taking medication. Now, they are closely supervised. In another change, he said, a patient advocate has been assigned to monitor lengths of stay.

Interviewed on visiting weekend in April, Private Thurman, Ms. deVarennes's son, said he had passed an alternative physical fitness test that replaced running with walking. But after graduating basic training in November with his family at the ceremony, he said, he and two other soldiers were "ungraduated" and put into the Physical Training and Rehabilitation Program. He was belatedly found to have suffered stress fractures in his feet.

Mr. Long confirmed the confusion over the acceptability of the alternative test.

Private Thurman, who has completed more than four months in the program and has been sent to his first duty station as a computer artilleryman, and other soldiers said morale plummeted around mid-January with the arrival of a new drill sergeant, Robert Langford.

On the Martin Luther King's Birthday holiday weekend, with the rest of the post off duty, Sergeant Langford ordered the therapy unit to move out the bunk beds and lockers and hand scrape the wax off the floor tiles. When the results were not to his liking, the soldiers said, the sergeant had them redo it. While scraping, Private Scarano cracked his injured shoulder, he wrote home.

The kicking episode occurred about that time, soldiers said, when Sergeant Langford ordered an injured private, Damien McMahon, 21, of Emporia, Kan, "to take a knee," or bow, after losing his temper in a formation. Private McMahon, who had had knee surgery for a staph infection and was also in disciplinary trouble for sneaking to the PX on a tobacco run, said the investigators had asked him not to discuss the case. But he confirmed accounts by fellow soldiers that he had protested that kneeling was painful and that the sergeant had kicked him in his bad knee, loosening one of nine stitches.

Sergeant Langford, reached by telephone at home at Fort Sill, refused to discuss the accusations and denied that he had been suspended before hanging up.

Also around January, soldiers said, another drill sergeant, Troy Bullock, suspected that a soldier in the unit had sneaked a cigarette and ordered the entire injury unit woken up every hour from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. for uniform changes and formations, even though some patients were on heavy sleep medications, the soldiers said. Mr. Long said he could not comment, and no telephone listing for Sergeant Bullock could be found.

On March 7, in an e-mail note to Ms. deVarennes later put on her blog, Private Scarano said, "I am a casualty of a broken system; I fell through the cracks of the bureaucracy."

If he could get out at least temporarily, Private Scarano said, he wanted to explore a more promising civilian procedure to repair his shoulder "instead of being a guinea pig to a medical system I have no faith in, whatever."

    Army Acts to Curb Abuses of Injured Recruits, NYT, 12.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/12/us/12training.html?hp&ex=1147492800&en=5d9e5826aff47093&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Duty and tuition draw US military recruits

Sun May 7, 2006 2:05 PM ET
Reuters
By Jane Sutton

MIAMI (Reuters) - The Iraq war has made it tougher to sign up young men and women for the all-volunteer U.S. military, but a group of new recruits said they were drawn by a sense of duty, a chance for adventure, career training and college tuition benefits.

Coast Guard recruit Joshua Gonzalez, a Miami native nearing his 18th birthday, said he joined the military in part because his career options seemed limited.

"Jobs are hard to find in Miami, I can't pay for college."

Gonzalez was one of 144 recruits sworn into the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force or Coast Guard during a ceremony in a sweltering hangar at the Opa-locka Airport near Miami last week.

Gonzalez said he chose the Coast Guard in part because he wanted to defend his homeland, from its own shores.

His mother, Linda Murray, watched the ceremony proudly from a row of folding chairs and tried not to dwell on the chance her son could be assigned to a ship on Iraq war duty in the Middle East.

"I think it's a good thing, an honorable thing. It's his duty," Murray said. "It's a big contribution. Then if they don't come back, it's a sacrifice. You kind of tuck that deep down. ... You've got to have some faith."

The swearing-in ceremony was part of the annual McDonald's Air & Sea Show that continued through Sunday in south Florida, where the military's elite parachutists and precision flying teams showed their skills and high-tech hardware, partly to attract recruits.

While the other branches of the military exceeded their recruiting goals last year, the Army, which provides the bulk of U.S. ground forces in the Iraq war, missed its target by about 9 percent and lagged slightly behind last year's numbers during the first half of fiscal 2006.

One recruiter said the newest members of the military were aware of the possible dangers.

"They know what they're getting into. They watch the news all the time," said Navy recruiter Mack Pierce.

'GREAT OPPORTUNITY'

Rene Carbonell said he joined the Army and asked for an infantry assignment because he wants to be on the front lines.

"I wanted to be right there where everything is. I'm ready to go," said Carbonell, 18. "I want to serve my country. I think that's what most people want to do when they join the military."

Amos Aristil, 19, a Haitian-born U.S. citizen, said he joined the Navy to help protect his new country and to train in the medical corps to become a dental assistant.

"It is a great opportunity for me," Aristil said.

Shakita Cook, 18, said she joined the Army in part because the college tuition benefits will help her study for a career in criminal justice. But also because, "I want to go overseas, I want to see different stuff."

Quasan Browne, an 18-year-old Air Force recruit, said he joined because, "Someone has to do it."

"We've got to protect our families. War is not a problem, as long as we can keep everyone at home safe."

Browne wants to work in the Air Force Intelligence Service and likes the idea of launching into a career now rather than spending years in college and then starting a job hunt.

"They're going to give me college credits while I get the experience. ... I'm going to get my life started sooner," he said.

"I know there's a risk. You've got to take a chance," Browne said.

Joshua Vakili, a 20-year-old Marine recruit with his hair shaved into a mohawk, said it might be "a bad time to join," but that he wanted to do something that would push him hard.

"I always wanted to do something very tough," said Vakili, who hopes to join a Special Forces reconnaissance unit, serve 20 years in the military and then join the CIA or FBI.

"It doesn't bother me that much that a war's going on. It scares me sometimes but I'm not too worried," Vakili said.

    Duty and tuition draw US military recruits, R, 7.5.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-05-07T180454Z_01_N54260218_RTRUKOC_0_US-ARMS-RECRUITS.xml

Pentagon takes recruiting to new heights

Posted 5/7/2006 7:22 PM ET
USA Today

CHICAGO (AP) — Hit by one of its most difficult recruiting periods in decades, the Defense Department is paying United Airlines to show passengers a Pentagon-produced video touting military jobs.

The 13-minute video Today's Military is played between standard in-flight programming, such as NBC sitcoms or Discovery Channel productions, the Chicago Tribune reported.

It profiles five military jobs, none in dangerous regions such as Iraq or Afghanistan. The video shows only one soldier beyond U.S. borders: an Army animal-care specialist on a humanitarian mission in Thailand.

The Defense Department is paying United about $36,000 to run the video from April 17 through May 17, said Lt. Bradley Terrill, project officer for the video.

By the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, the Army closed out one of its most difficult recruiting periods in decades, falling more than 6,600 recruits short of its annual goal of 80,000. It was the first shortfall since 1999, and the largest in 26 years.

It was unclear whether the military has contracts to show the video on other commercial airlines. Lt. Col. Todd Vician, a Pentagon spokesman, told The Associated Press on Sunday that he could not immediately provide more information on the video.

United said it's not unusual for companies to pay for promotional spots on flights.

Tom Bivins, a professor of media ethics at the University of Oregon, said the military's omission of production credits on the video is questionable.

"People need to realize they are being advertised to," Bivins said.

    Pentagon takes recruiting to new heights, UT, 7.5.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-07-air-recruiting_x.htm

Sailors, airmen land new role

Posted 5/7/2006 11:46 PM ET
USA Today
By Tom Vanden Brook

WASHINGTON — The Navy and Air Force are training their sailors and airmen for war duty far from the seas or skies: jobs typically performed by a strained Army in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Navy and Air Force personnel are replacing Army soldiers to carry out such duties as guarding convoys, patrolling bases and watching for homemade bombs, the top killer of U.S. troops in Iraq.

The Navy also is running a prison in Iraq, patrolling rivers and helping to clear and search buildings.

About 8,000 sailors are on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Rear Adm. David Gove, head of the Navy Personnel Command. By the end of the year, that number is expected to grow to as many as 12,000, he says.

Gove says it makes sense to tap into a broader pool of talent. "There is a realization of capability in other parts of the services that we need to leverage," he says.

The Air Force has not said how many airmen are doing Army jobs.

Army spokesman Lt. Col. Carl Ey says the training gives commanders more flexibility and doesn't signal a shortage of soldiers.

Andrew Krepinevich, a military analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, counters: "If the Army wasn't having recruiting challenges and exceeding rotation rates, we wouldn't be having this discussion."

Krepinevich authored a Pentagon-sponsored report earlier this year that found extended deployments were straining the military.

Frederick Kagan, a military historian at the American Enterprise Institute, says training sailors and airmen to do the jobs of seasoned soldiers is "what you do only when you're desperate."

The Navy's crash course on combat at the Army's Fort Jackson in South Carolina is staffed by Army instructors and trains about 200 sailors every two weeks. It stresses rifle skills, troop movements, first aid, convoy security and identifying roadside bombs.

Master Chief Doug Boswell, 46, who recently completed the course, says he'll rely on the skills to keep him and his sailors safe during their one-year tour in Iraq. "They're trying to get sailors ready for rigors of shore duty in potentially hostile overseas ports," he says.

The Air Force this year extended its basic training course to eight weeks from six. "I see our future as an expeditionary force in this long war on terrorism," Air Force chief of staff Michael Moseley says.

    Sailors, airmen land new role,UT, 7.5.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-07-navy-air-training_x.htm

Pentagon Surfing Thousands of Jihad Sites

May 4, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:58 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Pentagon research team monitors more than 5,000 jihadist Web sites, focusing daily on the 25 to 100 most hostile and active, defense officials say.

The team includes 25 linguists, who cover multiple dialects of the Arabic language and provide reports on events sparking anger on extremist Web sites, Dan Devlin, a Pentagon public diplomacy specialist, said Thursday. The researchers, for instance, focused in November on the backlash caused by the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

Devlin testified to Congress as part of a briefing on how terrorists use the Internet.

Extremist propaganda is most often used to recruit jihadist fighters and supporters between the ages of 7 and 25, the officials said. But ''we've seen products that are aimed at ages even lower than 7,'' testified Pentagon contractor Ron Roughhead. His company wasn't identified, for security reasons.

According to the briefing, al-Qaida has advertised online to fill jobs for Internet specialists, and its media group has distributed computer games and recruitment videos that use everything from poetry to humor to false information to gather support. The media group has assembled montages of American politicians taking aim at the Arab world.

''This crusade -- crusade -- crusade -- is going to take awhile,'' President Bush says in one video, edited to make him repeat the word ''crusade'' six other times.

The officials said they are hoping to give a version of the briefing eventually to all U.S. soldiers in Iraq and the broader region.

The goal is ''to help train U.S. forces deploying to Iraq on radical Islam and the need to respect Arabic and Muslim culture,'' said House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich.

Also Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee discussed legislation that would go after al-Qaida's more private communications using Bush's warrantless surveillance program.

The committee broke without voting on several bills to govern the controversial program, which allows the National Security Agency to monitor -- without court warrants -- terror-related communications between the U.S. and overseas.

Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., has introduced a bill that would require the administration to get approval for the surveillance from a secretive federal court every 90 days. He circulated a possible modification to his proposal late Wednesday that Democrats suggested would give the government more flexibility to conduct surveillance.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., asked Specter to postpone consideration of any bill until she and other lawmakers get more information on the program from the administration. ''We cannot fairly consider legislation,'' she wrote Specter.

------

On the Net:

House Intelligence Committee: http://intelligence.house.gov/

Senate Judiciary Committee: http://judiciary.senate.gov/

    Pentagon Surfing Thousands of Jihad Sites, NYT, 5.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Congress-Terrorism.html

Administration Conducting Research Into Laser Weapon

May 3, 2006
The New York Times
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

The Bush administration is seeking to develop a powerful ground-based laser weapon that would use beams of concentrated light to destroy enemy satellites in orbit.

The largely secret project, parts of which have been made public through Air Force budget documents submitted to Congress in February, is part of a wide-ranging effort to develop space weapons, both defensive and offensive. No treaty or law forbids such work.

The laser research was described by federal officials who would speak only on the condition of anonymity because of the topic's political sensitivity. The White House has recently sought to play down the issue of space arms, fearing it could become an election-year liability.

Indeed, last week Republicans and Democrats on a House Armed Services subcommittee moved unanimously to cut research money for the project in the administration's budget for the 2007 fiscal year. While Republicans on the panel would not discuss their reasons for the action, Congressional aides said it reflected a bipartisan consensus for moving cautiously on space weaponry, a potentially controversial issue that has yet to be much debated.

The full committee is expected to take up the budget issue today.

The laser research is far more ambitious than a previous effort by the Clinton administration nearly a decade ago to test an antisatellite laser. It would take advantage of an optical technique that uses sensors, computers and flexible mirrors to counteract the atmospheric turbulence that seems to make stars twinkle.

The weapon would essentially reverse that process, shooting focused beams of light upward with great clarity and force.

Though futuristic and technically challenging, the laser work is relatively inexpensive by government standards — about $20 million in 2006, with planned increases to some $30 million by 2011 — partly because no weapons are as yet being built and partly because the work is being done at an existing base, an unclassified government observatory called Starfire in the New Mexico desert.

In interviews, military officials defended the laser research as prudent, given the potential need for space arms to defend American satellites against attack in the years and decades ahead. "The White House wants us to do space defense," said a senior Pentagon official who oversees many space programs, including the laser effort. "We need that ability to protect our assets" in orbit.

But some Congressional Democrats and other experts fault the research as potential fuel for an antisatellite arms race that could ultimately hurt this nation more than others because the United States relies so heavily on military satellites, which aid navigation, reconnaissance and attack warning.

In a statement, Representative Loretta Sanchez, a California Democrat on the subcommittee who opposes the laser's development, thanked her Republican colleagues for agreeing to curb a program "with the potential to weaponize space."

Theresa Hitchens, director of the Center for Defense Information, a private group in Washington that tracks military programs, said the subcommittee's action last week was a significant break with the administration. "It's really the first time you've seen the Republican-led Congress acknowledge that these issues require public scrutiny," she said.

In a statement, the House panel, the Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, made no reference to such policy disagreements but simply said that "none of the funds authorized for this program shall be used for the development of laser space technologies with antisatellite purposes."

It is unclear whether the Republican-controlled Congress will sustain the subcommittee's proposed cut to the administration's request, even if the full House Armed Services Committee backs the reduction.

The Air Force has pursued the secret research for several years but discussed it in new detail in its February budget request. The documents stated that for the 2007 fiscal year, starting in October, the research will seek to "demonstrate fully compensated laser propagation to low earth orbit satellites."

The documents listed several potential uses of the laser research, the first being "antisatellite weapons."

The overall goal of the research, the documents said, is to assess unique technologies for "high-energy laser weapons," in what engineers call a proof of concept. Previously, the laser work resided in a budget category that paid for a wide variety of space efforts, the documents said. But for the new fiscal year, it has moved under the heading "Advanced Weapons Technology."

In interviews, Pentagon officials said the policy rationale for the arms research dated from a 1996 presidential directive in the Clinton administration that allows "countering, if necessary, space systems and services used for hostile purposes."

In 1997, the American military fired a ground-based laser in New Mexico at an American spacecraft, calling it a test of satellite vulnerability. Federal experts said recently that the laser had had no capability to do atmospheric compensation and that the test had failed to do any damage.

Little else happened until January 2001, when a commission led by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the newly nominated defense secretary, warned that the American military faced a potential "Pearl Harbor" in space and called for a defensive arsenal of space weapons.

The Starfire research is part of that effort.

Federal officials and private experts said the antisatellite work drew on a body of unclassified advances that have made the Starfire researchers world-famous among astronomers. Their most important unclassified work centers on using small lasers to create artificial stars that act as beacons to guide the process of atmospheric compensation.

When astronomers use the method, they aim a small laser at a point in the sky close to a target star or galaxy, and the concentrated light excites molecules of air (or, at higher altitudes, sodium atoms in the upper atmosphere) to glow brightly.

Distortions in the image of the artificial star as it returns to Earth are measured continuously and used to deform the telescope's flexible mirror and rapidly correct for atmospheric turbulence. That sharpens images of both the artificial star and the astronomical target.

Unclassified pictures of Starfire in action show a pencil-thin laser beam shooting up from its hilltop observatory into the night sky.

The Starfire researchers are now investigating how to use guide stars and flexible mirrors in conjunction with powerful lasers that could flash their beams into space to knock out enemy satellites, according to federal officials and Air Force budget documents.

"These are really smart folks who are optimistic about their technology," said the senior Pentagon official. "We want those kind of people on our team."

But potential weapon applications, he added, if one day approved, "are out there years and years and years into the future."

The research centers on Starfire's largest telescope, which Air Force budget documents call a "weapon-class beam director." Its main mirror, 11.5 feet in diameter, can gather in faint starlight or, working in the opposite direction, direct powerful beams of laser light skyward.

Federal officials said Starfire's antisatellite work had grown out of one of the site's other military responsibilities: observing foreign satellites and assessing their potential threat to the United States. In 2000, the Air Force Research Laboratory, which runs Starfire, said the observatory's large telescope, by using adaptive optics, could distinguish objects in orbit the size of a basketball at a distance of 1,000 miles.

Another backdrop to the antisatellite work is Starfire's use of telescopes, adaptive optics and weak lasers to track and illuminate satellites. It is considered a baby step toward developing a laser powerful enough to cripple spacecraft.

Col. Gregory Vansuch, who oversees Starfire research for the Air Force Research Laboratory, said in an interview that the facility used weak lasers and the process of atmospheric compensation to illuminate satellites "all the time." Such tests, Colonel Vansuch emphasized, are always done with the written permission of the satellite's owner.

He said that about once a month, Starfire conducted weeklong experiments that illuminate satellites up to 20 times.

Though the House subcommittee recommended eliminating all financing next year for antisatellite laser research, it retained money for other laser development. Congressional aides said the proposed cut to the Air Force's $21.4 million budget request for such work would eliminate two of three areas of development, for a total reduction of $6.5 million.

At least one public-interest group has seized on the issue. Last week, the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, based in Brunswick, Me., said that if Congress approved the antisatellite money, "the barrier to weapons in space will have been destroyed."

    Administration Conducting Research Into Laser Weapon, NYT, 3.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/03/washington/03laser.html?hp&ex=1146715200&en=d7c1adf7a14592f1&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Textron fought storm to deliver for Army

Updated 5/2/2006 2:36 AM ET
USA TODAY
By Elliot Blair Smith

NEW ORLEANS — Retired Army colonel David Treuting rolls down Chef Menteur Highway at 70 miles an hour in a 30,000-pound, desert-camouflaged armored vehicle that his employer, defense contractor Textron(TXT) , builds for the Army. The wind-whipped Bayou Sauvage passes by as a gray blur.

Treuting, a Textron salesman, says the police complain when he speeds, demonstrating the M1117 Armored Security Vehicle to military brass, politicians and VIPs. Gawkers are taken aback by its oddly slanting armor, which is designed to deflect rocket-propelled grenades and land mines.

But these days, Textron and the Army are hurrying to make up for lost time. Whenever the defense contractor completes the assembly of a half-dozen ASVs at its two New Orleans-area plants, the Army rolls them onto a cargo airplane and flies them directly to U.S. forces in Iraq.

Last July, the Army agreed to spend up to $500 million to buy 724 ASVs. That represented vindication — and more — to Treuting, 54, a former military police officer who spent a decade trying to persuade the military hierarchy to adopt this armored ugly duckling. Though he recently had retired, his son and son-in-law, both Army officers, were fighting in Iraq.

"This vehicle is designed to bring the crew home," Treuting says, leaving no room for doubt.

Just as Textron ramped up production, however, Hurricane Katrina struck. A 16-foot wall of water swept across the Bayou Sauvage. Overrun by sea spray, marsh grass and mud, the principal ASV manufacturing line in east New Orleans was largely destroyed. A second plant, in Slidell, was damaged.

Today, after a major recovery effort, the ASV again rolls out at prestorm levels. Having barely escaped an early demise at the hands of Pentagon cost cutters, and then surviving the largest natural disaster in U.S. history, the ASV's comeback is a testament to the resiliency of Textron employees and leadership. The rugged ASV also offers an inspiring tale for American men and women whose lives it protects.

"I know for a fact that my mom loves the idea that I'm in a nice big tank-looking vehicle," says Army Sgt. John Russell, 29, a military policeman at Camp Liberty, Iraq.

Unlikely survival

Treuting, 6-foot-4 and 285 pounds, was director of combat development at the U.S. Army's Military Police School in 1996 when he began writing Army specifications for a new generation of armored vehicles. After the Cold War, U.S. military planners realized future combat might not be on traditional battlefields — with the enemy massed in front of U.S. forces — but against guerrillas and terrorists.

Textron won a small design contract for the Army's military police, based on an early-1960s dinosaur it had built known as the V-150.

Between Army demands for new technology and Textron engineers' development of the vehicle, the ASV continued to evolve until it was fielded on a small scale in 2000. The company argued that the wheeled ASV's armor, firepower and mobility were perfect for the type of urban warfare that Allied forces had confronted in the Balkans and anticipated in Iraq.

But, two years later, the Army opted for General Dynamics' larger, more expensive Stryker combat vehicle, the first new vehicle to enter Army service since the M1 Abrams tank in the 1980s. Each Stryker basic infantry vehicle costs the Army about $2 million compared with $700,000 for the ASV.

Congress zeroed out ASV appropriations. The program seemed destined for oblivion until a military police commander in Iraq issued an urgent request for the ASV in June 2004, Textron says. By then, U.S. military convoys and patrols were being targeted by threats the ASV defends well against.

Safer than the Humvee

Retired Army colonel Douglas Macgregor, a former armored cavalry commander, says, "This Textron vehicle is a good example of what was needed in Iraq early on. ... It's come late, just as the body armor came late and everything else has come late." Macgregor has no professional ties to Textron.

Bigger and better armored than a Humvee but smaller and more maneuverable in urban settings than a tank, the ASV's oblique armor sends explosive devices tumbling away on impact, rather than presenting a flat, more vulnerable face as the Humvee does.

It also incorporates heavy guns — a grenade launcher and machine gun — that are mounted in its turret, allowing the three-man crew to reload safely, unlike the Humvee, on which the gunner is exposed.

Army Spc. Anthony Bernini, 22, of North Hampton, Pa., a military policeman at Fort Carson, Colo., was the gunner in an ASV that survived a roadside bomb attack and a firefight last year in Mosul, Iraq, without incurring any significant damage. Says Bernini: "The first time I saw it, I was amazed with it. I fell in love with it right away. The way it looked, it looked tough."

Recovery campaign

Textron, founded in 1923 as a small textile company, supplied landing boats and parachutes to the military during World War II. After the war, it made bed linens, blouses, lingerie and other consumer goods. Today, the company builds Bell Helicopters, Cessna aircraft and E-Z-Go golf carts. Its 37,000 employees in 30 countries generate $10 billion in annual sales.

In Katrina's aftermath, Textron Systems President Richard Millman formed an emergency management committee at divisional headquarters in Wilmington, Mass., to make some hard decisions about the program. "We all felt the urgent need to get the production back up and running," Millman says.

The biggest question was whether to salvage the two New Orleans-area plants and their 1,150 jobs or to move production and start from scratch. In effect, the choice was whether to sacrifice many of the company's longtime employees for the Army's urgent, near-term needs. Textron spokeswoman Karen Gordon, who participated in the deliberations, describes them as "gut-wrenching."

Vice President Tom Walmsley says, "Given the Army's need for these vehicles, we said whatever is the quickest way to get the vehicle up and running is the avenue we will pursue." The calculations came down narrowly on the side of salvaging local plants and jobs.

Textron officials used company helicopters, air-cushion boats and motorized golf carts to shuttle in and out of the plants even before roads and airports opened. Textron Vice President Clay Moise says, "I was the first one into the facility ... and, having been through (hurricanes) time and time again in my life, even I was absolutely shocked at what I found here."

Cleanup crews, armed with pitchforks, waded through thick mud, marsh grass, a dead alligator and wriggling water moccasins; more than 200 poisonous snakes were killed in the compound, some finding refuge as high as the second-floor conference room.

Private contractors hastened to remove 1,000 truckloads of mud, scrap metal and marsh grass from factory grounds. About 250 welding machines — critical for piecing together the ASV's armor — had washed away. Much of the plant's electrical wiring was destroyed by the salt water. In any event, the city's electrical power supplies were intermittent. Water and sewage facilities were inoperable.

Management found it easier to solve these problems than the human ones. "The No. 1 problem when we got this plant back is we had no employees," says Walmsley.

Millman says he decided to pay each one of the plant's displaced employees indefinitely, even though he did not know how much the expenditure might amount to. "They lost their homes, they lost their belongings, they lost their car, they lost their living environment, which is a brutal thing to have happen. They may have lost a loved one or a pet. If you lose your job — walk in their shoes," he says.

As workers gradually reassembled in federal trailers, at what became known as Textron City, the company provided them with three meals a day at an estimated additional cost of $1 million.

Textron estimates total uninsured storm damages at $18 million against just $70 million in ASV revenue last year. It would be eight weeks until the ASV resumed rolling off the New Orleans assembly lines. Each ASV requires 3,000 worker hours, much of it involving skilled handwork, to complete.

But the company estimates it retained 88% of its workforce at a time when its east New Orleans neighborhood is all but inhabitable and many competing employers in the area are laboring short-handed.

Moise, vice president of development, says, "They rallied every resource possible to help people here first. It's not wholly unselfish. Ultimately, we will be generating tens and tens of millions of dollars of revenue and profits for the company. But their focus was on the 1,150 employees that were here."

Amazing journey

By the end of March, Textron was delivering 32 ASVs a month. That is right where production was before Katrina struck, though short of the 48 a month the Army wanted by now. Textron plans to deliver 450 ASVs worth $315 million this year.

As the ASV has proved itself in Iraq, Army orders have grown to 1,200 worth about $840 million.

It has been a remarkable journey for a fighting machine the Army barely kept alive, year after year.

One ASV booster is Lt. Christopher Treuting, 25, of Fort Hood, Texas, the retired colonel Treuting's son. A military police platoon leader who recently returned to the USA from Iraq, the younger Treuting says the ASV enabled one of his crews to survive a bomb attack near Baghdad last year.

The blast destroyed the ASV's drive shaft and deflated all four tires yet did not stop the vehicle and its crew from limping to safety.

"I would have probably three dead soldiers if they weren't in the ASV," he says.

Lt. Treuting also credits his father for battling the Army brass to save the ASV, saying, "That was a major fight until the day he retired."

The father replies that he has "65,000 reasons" — as many as there are Army MPs — why he keeps promoting the ASV.

The retired colonel says, "It's personal, real personal."

    Textron fought storm to deliver for Army, UT, 2.5.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/2006-05-01-textron-usat_x.htm

Young Officers Join the Debate Over Rumsfeld

April 23, 2006
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, April 22 — The revolt by retired generals who publicly criticized Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has opened an extraordinary debate among younger officers, in military academies, in the armed services' staff colleges and even in command posts and mess halls in Iraq.

Junior and midlevel officers are discussing whether the war plans for Iraq reflected unvarnished military advice, whether the retired generals should have spoken out, whether active-duty generals will feel free to state their views in private sessions with the civilian leaders and, most divisive of all, whether Mr. Rumsfeld should resign.

In recent weeks, military correspondents of The Times discussed those issues with dozens of younger officers and cadets in classrooms and with combat units in the field, as well as in informal conversations at the Pentagon and in e-mail exchanges and telephone calls.

To protect their careers, the officers were granted anonymity so they could speak frankly about the debates they have had and have heard. The stances that emerged are anything but uniform, although all seem colored by deep concern over the quality of civil-military relations, and the way ahead in Iraq.

The discussions often flare with anger, particularly among many midlevel officers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan and face the prospect of additional tours of duty.

"This is about the moral bankruptcy of general officers who lived through the Vietnam era yet refused to advise our civilian leadership properly," said one Army major in the Special Forces who has served two combat tours. "I can only hope that my generation does better someday."

An Army major who is an intelligence specialist said: "The history I will take away from this is that the current crop of generals failed to stand up and say, 'We cannot do this mission.' They confused the cultural can-do attitude with their responsibilities as leaders to delay the start of the war until we had an adequate force. I think the backlash against the general officers will be seen in the resignation of officers" who might otherwise have stayed in uniform.

One Army colonel enrolled in a Defense Department university said an informal poll among his classmates indicated that about 25 percent believed that Mr. Rumsfeld should resign, and 75 percent believed that he should remain. But of the second group, two-thirds thought he should acknowledge errors that were made and "show that he is not the intolerant and inflexible person some paint him to be," the colonel said.

Many officers who blame Mr. Rumsfeld are not faulting President Bush — in contrast to the situation in the 1960's, when both President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara drew criticism over Vietnam from the officer corps. (Mr. McNamara, like Mr. Rumsfeld, was also resented from the outset for his attempts to reshape the military itself.)

But some are furiously criticizing both, along with the military leadership, like the Army major in the Special Forces. "I believe that a large number of officers hate Rumsfeld as much as I do, and would like to see him go," he said.

"The Army, however, went gently into that good night of Iraq without saying a word," he added, summarizing conversations with other officers. "For that reason, most of us know that we have to share the burden of responsibility for this tragedy. And at the end of the day, it wasn't Rumsfeld who sent us to war, it was the president. Officers know better than anyone else that the buck stops at the top. I think we are too deep into this for Rumsfeld's resignation to mean much.

"But this is all academic. Most officers would acknowledge that we cannot leave Iraq, regardless of their thoughts on the invasion. We destroyed the internal security of that state, so now we have to restore it. Otherwise, we will just return later, when it is even more terrible."

The debates are fueled by the desire to mete out blame for the situation in Iraq, a drawn-out war that has taken many military lives and has no clear end in sight. A midgrade officer who has served two tours in Iraq said a number of his cohorts were angered last month when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that "tactical errors, a thousand of them, I am sure," had been made in Iraq.

"We have not lost a single tactical engagement on the ground in Iraq," the officer said, noting that the definition of tactical missions is specific movements against an enemy target. "The mistakes have all been at the strategic and political levels."

Many officers said a crisis of leadership extended to serious questions about top generals' commitment to sustain a seasoned officer corps that was being deployed on repeated tours to the long-term counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the rest of the government did not appear to be on the same wartime footing.

"We are forced to develop innovative ways to convince, coerce and cajole officers to stay in to support a war effort of national-level importance that is being done without a defensewide, governmentwide or nationwide commitment of resources," said one Army colonel with experience in Iraq.

Another Army major who served in Iraq said a fresh round of debates about the future of the American military had also broken out. Simply put, the question is whether the focus should be, as Mr. Rumsfeld believes, on a lean high-tech force with an eye toward possible opponents like China, or on troop-heavy counterinsurgency missions more suited to hunting terrorists, with spies and boots on the ground.

In general, the Army and Marines support maintaining beefy ground forces, while the Navy and Air Force — the beneficiaries of much of the high-tech arsenal — favor the leaner approach. And some worry that those arguments have become too fierce.

"I think what has the potential for scarring relations is the two visions of warfare — one that envisions near-perfect situational awareness and technology dominance, and the other that sees future war as grubby, dirty and chaotic," the major said. "These visions require vastly different forces. The tension comes when we only have the money to build one of these forces. Who gets the cash?"

Some senior officers said part of their own discussions were about fears for the immediate future, centering on the fact that Mr. Rumsfeld has surrounded himself with senior officers who share his views and are personally invested in his policies.

"If civilian officials feel as if they could be faced with a revolt of sorts, they will select officers who are like-minded," said another Army officer who has served in Iraq. "They will, as a result, get the military advice they want based on whom they appoint."

Kori Schake, a fellow at the Hoover Institution who teaches Army cadets at West Point, said some of the debates revolved around the issues raised in "Dereliction of Duty," a book that analyzes why the Joint Chiefs of Staff seemed unable or unwilling to challenge civilian decisions during the war in Vietnam. Published in 1997, the book was written by Col. H. R. McMaster, who recently returned from a year in Iraq as commander of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment.

"It's a fundamentally healthy debate," Ms. Schake said. "Junior officers look around at the senior leadership and say, 'Are these people I admire, that I want to be like?' "

These younger officers "are debating the standard of leadership," she said. "Is it good enough to do only what civilian masters tell you to do? Or do you have a responsibility to shape that policy, and what actions should you undertake if you believe they are making mistakes?"

The conflicts some officers express reflect the culture of commander and subordinate that sometimes baffles the civilian world. No class craves strong leadership more than the military.

"I feel conflicted by this debate, and I think a lot of my colleagues are also conflicted," said an Army colonel completing a year at one of the military's advanced schools. He expressed discomfort at the recent public criticism of Mr. Rumsfeld and the Iraq war planning by retired generals, including Lt. Gen. Gregory S. Newbold, the former operations officer for the Joint Chiefs, who wrote, in Time magazine, "My sincere view is that the commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions — or bury the results."

But the colonel said his classmates were also aware of how the Rumsfeld Pentagon quashed dissenting views that many argued were proved correct, and prescient, like those of Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, a former Army chief of staff. He was shunted aside after telling Congress, before the invasion, that it would take several hundred thousand troops to secure and stabilize Iraq.

Others contend that the military's own failings are equally at fault. A field-grade officer now serving in Iraq said he thought it was incorrect for the retired generals to call for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation. His position, he said, is that "if there is a judgment to be cast, it rests as much upon the shoulders of our senior military leaders."

That officer, like several others interviewed, emphasized that while these issues often occupied officers' minds, the debate had not hobbled the military's ability to function in Iraq. "No impact here that I can see regarding this subject," he said.

    Young Officers Join the Debate Over Rumsfeld, NYT, 23.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/washington/23military.html?hp&ex=1145851200&en=307b714052e595e5&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Army suicides hit highest level since 1993

Updated 4/22/2006 1:15 AM ET
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of U.S. Army soldiers who took their own lives increased last year to the highest total since 1993, despite a growing effort by the Army to detect and prevent suicides.

In 2005, a total of 83 soldiers committed suicide, compared with 67 in 2004, and 60 in 2003 — the year U.S.-led forces invaded Iraq. Four other deaths in 2005 are being investigated as possible suicides but have not yet been confirmed. The totals include active duty Army soldiers and deployed National Guard and Reserve troops.

"Although we are not alarmed by the slight increase, we do take suicide prevention very seriously," said Army spokesman Col. Joseph Curtin.

"We have increased the number of combat stress teams, increased suicide prevention and training, and we are working very aggressively to change the culture so that soldiers feel comfortable coming forward with their personal problems in a culture where historically admitting mental health issues was frowned upon," Curtin said.

Of the confirmed suicides last year, 25 were soldiers deployed to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — which amounts to 40% of the 64 suicides by Army soldiers in Iraq since the conflict began in March 2003.

The suicide rate for the Army has fluctuated over the past 25 years, from a high of 15.8 per 100,000 in 1985 to a low of 9.1 per 100,000 in 2001. Last year it was nearly 13 per 100,000.

The Army recorded 90 suicides in 1993, with a suicide rate of 14.2 per 100,000.

The Army rate is higher than the civilian suicide rate for 2003, which was 10.8 per 100,000, according to the National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the Army number tracked closely with the rate for civilians aged 18-34, which was 12.19 per 100,000 in 2003.

When suicides among soldiers in Iraq spiked in the summer of 2003, the Army put together a mental health assessment team that met with troops. Investigators found common threads in the circumstances of the soldiers who committed suicide — including personal financial problems, failed personal relationships and legal problems.

Since then, the Army has increased the number of mental health professionals and placed combat stress teams with units. According to the Army, there are more than 230 mental health practitioners working in Iraq and Afghanistan, compared with "about a handful" when the war began, Curtin said.

Soldiers also get cards and booklets that outline suicide warning signs and how to get help.

But at least one veterans group says it's not enough.

"These numbers should be a wake-up call on the mental health impact of this war," said Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. "One in three soldiers will come back with post traumatic stress disorder or comparable mental health issues, or depression and severe anxiety."

Rieckhoff, who was a platoon leader in Iraq, said solders there face increased stress because they are often deployed to the warfront several times, they are fighting urban combat and their enemy blends in with the population, making it more difficult to tell friend from foe.

"You don't get much time to rest and with the increased insurgency, your chances of getting killed or wounded are growing," he said. "The Army is trying harder, but they've got an incredibly long way to go."

He added that while there are more psychiatrists, the soldiers are still in a war zone, "so you're just putting your finger in the dam."

    Army suicides hit highest level since 1993, UT, 22.4.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-04-21-armysuicides_x.htm

Texas school to study Gulf War illness

Posted 4/21/2006 10:02 PM ET
USA Today

DALLAS (AP) — When a few doctors began researching the memory loss, dizziness and loss of motor functions of some soldiers who had returned from the first Gulf War, they relied on private funding because of widespread skepticism about the illness.

But the government and medical community took notice after a 1997 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that the veterans had brain damage, not a psychological condition or stress. Attitudes slowly began changing, and a study a few years later showed that one in seven Gulf War veterans is sick.

Now the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas will receive $15 million a year for five years and is the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' designated Gulf War illness research center. Officials from the hospital and VA, which is funding the program, signed the formal partnership agreement Friday.

"Any time you have a new idea everybody's skeptical," said Dr. Robert Haley, who has led Gulf War illness studies — including the 1997 one — for more than a decade at the Dallas research hospital. "The Defense Department is fully bought in to what we're doing; the VA is fully bought in. Everybody's working together now, as you see today, to try to come up with a solution."

Texas has more than 100,000 Gulf War veterans, second only to North Carolina. Nearly 700,000 soldiers served in the Gulf War in the early 1990s.

UT Southwestern's main goal is to develop a test to diagnose the illness. The hospital conducts studies using an MRI with a powerful magnet that reveals more detailed images of brain functions, Haley said. Scans are taken while patients are asked to do tasks, such as identify pictures they recognize.

Hospital officials plan to buy a second MRI in the next year for the Dallas VA Hospital, where veterans ultimately can be diagnosed and treated in the coming years and the program expanded to other VA hospitals nationwide, Haley said.

"This has been beyond the reach of science," Haley said. "Everybody realizes we're on the verge of a real breakthrough here."

Haley and UT Southwestern began researching the illness in 1994 at the request of Texas billionaire businessman Ross Perot, whose help was sought by about a dozen soldiers suffering from symptoms, including disabilities in their children.

Perot said the topic was controversial because the government considered it "a 100-hour non-war — a heck of an insult for these men who had fought for our country." Perot ended up giving more than $2 million to the hospital for research over the next few years, Haley said.

U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison helped secure government funding in 1998, and the newly designated $75 million over the next five years was a provision sponsored by Hutchison in a spending bill for military construction and VA programs.

She said Friday that the research would help not only soldiers but farmers and others affected by chemicals such as pesticides.

"I also wanted to look to the future because we are going to have chemical warfare someday, I'm sure, and I want to be prepared for that," said Hutchison, R-Texas.

    Texas school to study Gulf War illness, UT, 21.4.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-04-21-gulf-war-illness_x.htm

News Analysis

Criticizing an Agent of Change as Failing to Adapt

April 21, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHAEL R. GORDON

In defending himself against his critics, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has described himself as an agent of change and suggested that the complaints come from old thinkers who oppose reforming the military.

"Change is difficult," Mr. Rumsfeld said Tuesday. "It also happens to be urgently necessary."

It is true that since the day he arrived at the Pentagon, the defense secretary has been a man on a mission. Convinced that the generals were locked in a cold-war mindset — "legacy thinking," he dubbed it — Mr. Rumsfeld promoted the virtues of relying on precision weapons and fast-paced operations instead of huge numbers of troops.

Instead of endorsing Clinton-style nation building, Mr. Rumsfeld said the United States should rely more on the locals to shoulder the burden after "regime change."

But as a half-dozen retired Army and Marine generals have called for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation, some criticize him in his own terms. The change-agent defense secretary, they say, is resistant to change.

Mr. Rumsfeld, the critics assert, was slow to acknowledge a growing insurgency in Iraq and to counter it. The military is overstretched by the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, but Mr. Rumsfeld has also resisted expanding the Army and Marines.

Paul D. Eaton, a retired two-star Army general who used to command the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Ga., and later helped train the new Iraqi military, said in an interview, "I was stunned," when a Pentagon review did not call for enlarging the Army and Marines. General Eaton, who called for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation in March, said, "They failed to account for the contemporary operating environment."

While the conduct of the war has provoked the critics, tensions between officers and their civilian boss began long before Iraq. Mr. Rumsfeld's pursuit of his "transformation" agenda stirred some of it.

So did the manner in which he executed it, viewed by many officers as overbearing. Calling himself "genetically impatient," Mr. Rumsfeld gave a talk the day before the Sept. 11 attacks in which he said the Pentagon bureaucracy was a threat to national security.

Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army colonel who has long argued that Army leaders were unimaginative and too cautious, recalls a Rumsfeld aide's jesting that the defense secretary thought the Army's problems could be solved by lining up 50 generals and gunning them down.

Certainly, there are experts who have argued that the Pentagon has long been in need of change. Mr. Rumsfeld's agenda to reshape the military, in fact, has long been shared by President Bush.

In a 1999 speech, Mr. Bush pledged to develop light, mobile and lethal units that could be quickly deployed. He vowed to appoint a secretary of defense who would change the military structure. Once in office, Mr. Bush decided that the strong-willed Mr. Rumsfeld was the man.

The new secretary wasted no time promoting his program. He was enamored of missile defense and precision weapons. He was skeptical about the Army leadership, which he considered old-fashioned, wedded to heavy forces and slow to change. The Army was pursing its own version of transformation, but it fell short of what Mr. Rumsfeld had in mind.

Tension Developed

Some longstanding critics of the Army leadership felt they finally had an ally at the top with Mr. Rumsfeld in charge. But soon there was friction between the new defense secretary and the generals he viewed as Clinton holdovers. As the United States began to plan its Afghan operation, Gen. Hugh Shelton, an Army general who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when Mr. Rumsfeld first took up his post at the Pentagon, became concerned that Mr. Rumsfeld's transformation agenda would get a field test before the military was ready.

Days before he retired, General Shelton ran into Maj. Gen. Dell Dailey, the two-star head of the Joint Special Operations Command, in the White House parking lot. The Afghan war plan depended heavily on Special Operations forces, and General Shelton warned that the military had to resist the defense secretary's push to pare forces. Lives and the success of the mission hung in the balance, he argued.

Mr. Rumsfeld would later argue that the Afghan operation had been a major success as the United States toppled the Taliban and eliminated Al Qaeda's camps by relying on Special Operations forces, Afghan allies, air strikes — and by avoiding the commitment of substantial ground forces. Critics, though, argued that the absence of adequate American soldiers had made it easier for Osama bin Laden to escape.

By the time the Iraq war approached, Richard B. Myers, an Air Force general, had been installed as the new Joint Chiefs chairman. Mr. Rumsfeld's supporters considered General Myers and his eventual successor, Gen. Peter Pace of the Marine Corps, to be helpful in overcoming deeply entrenched institutional resistance to transformation.

Dissent Discouraged

Critics say Mr. Rumsfeld discouraged dissent by elevating those who supported his program. "He tended to surround himself with those that support his agenda," said Maj. Gen. John Batiste, former commander of First Infantry Division and one of the retired generals who has criticized Mr. Rumsfeld. "He was involved with the selection of flag officers to an unprecedented level."

With his team in place, Mr. Rumsfeld summoned the senior military leadership to his Pentagon office in late 2001 to review the military's contingency plan for war with Iraq.

As Greg Newbold, the retired three-star general who served as chief operations deputy for the Joint Chiefs, outlined the plan, which called for as many as 500,000 troops, it was clear that Mr. Rumsfeld was increasingly irritated. He said he did not see why more than 125,000 troops would be required.

"My regret is that at the time I did not say, 'Mr. Secretary, if you try to put a number on a mission like this you may cause enormous mistakes,' " General Newbold recalled in an interview. "Give the military the task, give the military what you would like to see them do, and then let them come up with it. I was the junior military guy in the room, but I regret not saying it."

Former aides to Mr. Rumsfeld said he never told Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of the Central Command, how many troops to deploy. But Mr. Rumsfeld repeatedly asked why the force could not be smaller and deployed more quickly. He also planted ideas and sent papers — a process his aides called "suasion" — in line with his agenda. General Franks initially proposed a force of up to 385,000 troops. That number shrank as the war plan morphed from a version called the Generated Start, to the Running Start, to the Hybrid, to Cobra II. Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who was an adviser to Mr. Rumsfeld, described the discussions between General Franks and the defense secretary as one of "constant negotiation."

In a departure from typical practice, President Bush gave Mr. Rumsfeld and not the secretary of state responsibility for post-war Iraq. A month before the invasion, Mr. Rumsfeld outlined his philosophy in a speech called "Beyond Nation Building." By avoiding a large troop presence and major reconstruction, the United States would guard against the creation of a culture of dependence on the part of the Iraqis.

Eleven days after that speech, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, appeared before Congress and was asked how many troops might be required to secure post-war Iraq. His response was several hundred thousand. On Mr. Rumsfeld's instruction, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz complained about the remark to Thomas E. White, the Army secretary, the next morning. General Shinseki, Mr. Wolfowitz said, had spoken out of turn and was off base. (Mr. White dug in his heels in support of the general and was fired by Mr. Rumsfeld soon after Baghdad fell.)

Rumsfeld's Plan Different

For all of the controversy, General Shinseki's numbers were similar to those generated by the Central Command. General Franks had projected that the attack would begin with just a portion of the invasion force, which would grow to 250,000 troops by the time Saddam Hussein's force was defeated and the United States began to stabilize Iraq. There was, however, a subtle but significant difference. Secretary Rumsfeld hoped to off-ramp — that is, cancel the deployment — of some units if the Iraqi military's resistance crumbled, and he wanted to reduce the occupying force as quickly as possible.

As the war unfolded, there were enough troops to defeat the Republican Guard and take the Iraqi capital. But as American forces advanced on Baghdad, Secretary Rumsfeld pressed the question of off-ramping the First Cavalry Division, which was the final division in the war plan. General Franks went along. Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, the chief allied land war commander, was unhappy about the move, but did not protest.

The United States soon found there were not enough soldiers to control the borders, establish order in the capital or deprive the enemy of sanctuaries. The decision of L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the occupation authority, to disband the Iraq army only added to the deficit of forces. That decision was approved by Mr. Rumsfeld. Neither Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, nor the Joint Chiefs were consulted about the decision.

For months, Mr. Rumsfeld and General Myers refrained from describing the resistance in Iraq as an insurgency. Finally, on July 16, 2003, Gen. John P. Abizaid, who succeeded General Franks at the Central Command, told a Pentagon news conference that the United States was dealing with a "classical guerrilla-type campaign."

Some former generals say that General Franks and other military leaders bear responsibility for many of the miscalculations in Iraq. Gen. Jack Keane, the former acting Army chief of staff, said that the Bush administration's aversion to nation building was wrong for Iraq. But he faults the generals, including himself, for failing to develop a comprehensive plan for a potential insurgency.

"The fact is that the Ba'athist insurgency surprised us and we had not developed a comprehensive option for dealing with this possibility," he said. "This was not just an intelligence community failure, but also our failure as senior military leaders."

In an Op-Ed article last month in The New York Times, General Eaton wrote that another factor contributed to the problems: "I have seen a climate of groupthink become dominant and a growing reluctance by experienced military men and civilians to challenge the notions of the senior leadership."

Michael R. Gordon is the chief military correspondent for The New York Times. Reporting for this article is drawn from the book "Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq," which was published by Pantheon Books. He is the co-author with Bernard E. Trainor, a retired Marine lieutenant general and former military correspondent for the newspaper.

    Criticizing an Agent of Change as Failing to Adapt, NYT, 21.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/21/washington/21military.html?hp&ex=1145678400&en=c4dabcb508119257&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Pentagon releases extensive list of Guantanamo detainees

Thu Apr 20, 2006 2:20 AM ET
Reuters
By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon late on Wednesday released its most extensive list of foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, providing the names and nationalities of 558 detainees who went through a hearing process there.

The Pentagon posted the 11-page list on its Web site in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Associated Press.

Starting with the arrival from Afghanistan of the first group of 20 shackled and masked detainees on January 11, 2002, the United States had never until now released a comprehensive list of the names and nationalities of the prisoners at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Pentagon long resisted providing the information, citing security concerns such as keeping groups like al Qaeda in the dark about who was being imprisoned.

The United States previously identified some detainees in legal documents, while the names of hundreds had been made public by their relatives or lawyers.

On March 3, the Pentagon released more than 5,000 pages of documents relating to military hearings given to detainees at the base, which formally identified hundreds of the detainees as the result of a court order in the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Associated Press.

The Pentagon on April 3 released about 2,600 pages of additional documents with more information on the military review hearings given to detainees.

While the new list provided by the Pentagon contained 558 names, there are now about 490 detainees at the Guantanamo base the Pentagon said.

Air Force Lt. Col. Todd Vician, a Pentagon spokesman, said the list included some detainees who went through the review process but had since been transported out of the base.

"The Department of Defense determined that it is prudent to release the list and while many of the names are already a matter of public record, today's release provides the public with a single consolidated list containing this information," Vician said.

Rights activists have condemned the indefinite detentions and the prisoners' lack of legal rights. U.N. rights investigators have called for the closure of the prison.

Only 10 of the detainees at Guantanamo have been charged and not one of the trials has been completed. Most of the detainees were captured in Afghanistan and the Pentagon accused many of complicity with al Qaeda or the Taliban.

The Pentagon had designated the detainees as "enemy combatants," denying them the rights accorded to prisoners of war under international agreements.

(Additional reporting by Joanne Allen)

    Pentagon releases extensive list of Guantanamo detainees, R, 20.4.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyid=2006-04-20T062029Z_01_N19306659_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-GUANTANAMO.xml

Steve Bell        The Guardian        p. 31        19.4.2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/cartoons/stevebell/0,,1756700,00.html

L: US President George W. Bush
R: Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld

Call goes out for top brass to back Rumsfeld
Oliver Burkeman in New York        The Guardian        Monday April 17, 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1755292,00.html

 

Here's Donny! In His Defense, a Show Is Born

April 19, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, April 18 — It has become a daily ritual, the defense of the defense secretary, complete with praise from serving generals, tributes from the president and, from the man on the spot, doses of charm, combativeness and even some humility.

A session on Tuesday was the third time in five days that Donald H. Rumsfeld has sought to make a public case to remain as defense secretary.

"There are no indispensable men," Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon.

But the Bush administration sought to drive home the message that Mr. Rumsfeld was not going anywhere, no matter what critics might desire.

Again, Gen. Peter Pace of the Marines, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was at Mr. Rumsfeld's side, a visual prop to counter the message from a half-dozen or so retired generals that Mr. Rumsfeld should step down.

President Bush, having defended Mr. Rumsfeld on Friday from Camp David, had appeared before the cameras hours earlier, to make the case in person.

"I'm the decider, and I decide what's best," Mr. Bush said in the Rose Garden. "And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain as the secretary of defense."

Such extended repeated public displays of self-defense are not the norm in Washington, where beleaguered officeholders usually seek to maintain the pretense that criticism does not matter. Those who do respond most often use surrogates to extol their virtues.

But the extraordinary parade of generals who have stepped forward to defend Mr. Rumsfeld includes a bevy of retired officers, including Gen. Richard B. Myers of the Air Force, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Gen. Tommy R. Franks of the Army, who commanded American troops in the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts.

On Tuesday, Mr. Rumsfeld summoned another group of retired officers for a closed meeting, ostensibly to brief them on Iraq, but clearly also to enlist their support when they appear on television.

Perhaps the most notable examples of damage control since the retired generals' complaints gathered force have come from Mr. Rumsfeld, who has appeared on Al Arabiya television, the Rush Limbaugh radio program and, twice, before television cameras at the Pentagon.

The appearances have been layered with the verbal flair, acerbic wit and defiant touches that Mr. Rumsfeld has made his trademark. But on Tuesday, there was also an uncharacteristic flash of humility — an olive twig, if not a branch — from a man better known for his combativeness.

Mr. Rumsfeld, who has said he offered to resign two times after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, said he was "not inclined to be instantaneously judgmental" about what his critics were now saying, a message that has included complaints that his headstrong style causes him to disregard much of what anyone in a uniform tells him.

"Because of the importance of these matters being discussed, I'd like to reflect on them a bit," Mr. Rumsfeld said.

Within minutes, though, he said the views of the six generals who have called for his resignation were hardly representative, noting that the nation's 6,000 or 7,000 retired generals and admirals were not "unanimous on anything."

At Mr. Rumsfeld's side, General Pace added that soldiers in Iraq, showed no discernible dissatisfaction with Mr. Rumsfeld. General Pace said Gen. Michael W. Hagee, Marine Corps commandant, had just been there and reported that he "got exactly zero questions about the leadership in the department."

The calls for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation have abated since last week, when Mr. Bush asserted his authority as commander in chief to declare that Mr. Rumsfeld "has my full support and deepest appreciation."

The group that has called for the resignation includes two retired major generals who commanded troops in Iraq and a retired three-star general who was director of operations on the Joint Staff. Their comments have been criticized by other retired generals, who have said the group risks politicizing the armed forces.

A danger is that Republicans running in the November election will decide that Mr. Rumsfeld's continued presence in the cabinet could drag down their prospects and urge Mr. Bush to dump him.

A Senate Republican aide said that despite expressions of support for Mr. Rumsfeld by some Republican senators, many other members expressed deep concern privately.

"The nervousness here is with a figure as controversial as Rumsfeld at the head of a war that's declining in popularity, that becomes a real political problem for members who are up for re-election this fall," said the aide, who insisted on anonymity because he had been told not to discuss senators' private conversations.

With Congress in recess, the aide said, he knew of no organized effort among Senate Republicans to make their concerns public or to take them to the White House. But the aide said he expected discussions among senators to intensify when they returned next week. There are signs that the efforts to keep Republicans from defecting are working. On Tuesday, Representative Duncan Hunter, the California Republican who is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, issued a press release taking on Mr. Rumsfeld's critics point by point. The statement notes that the secretary had 273 meetings with senior commanders last year, illustrating "that Secretary Rumsfeld respects and relies on the judgment of the Pentagon's uniformed leadership."

After taking questions for a half-hour, Mr. Rumsfeld went to meet the retired military officers and civilian analysts. Many of those invited comment regularly on CNN, Fox News and other television and radio outlets and are part of the same community that is proving a problem.

In past meetings with the group, Mr. Rumsfeld has opened with lengthy statements. This time he said he would go straight to questions, participants said. He was asked about the criticism, said Maj. Gen. Thomas L. Wilkerson, who retired from the Marines and who attended the meeting.

"He said it's a diversion, and that it's taken him away from the full-time focus on things he needs to do," he said. Mr. Rumsfeld "was not chastened. If anything, he looked like he was energized by it."

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting for this article.

    Here's Donny! In His Defense, a Show Is Born, NYT, 19.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/19/washington/19rumsfeld.html?hp&ex=1145505600&en=208bd41a8e8b9aaf&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Rumsfeld Says Calls for Ouster 'Will Pass'

April 18, 2006
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER and DAVID S. CLOUD

WASHINGTON, April 17 — Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld predicted Monday that calls from retired generals for him to step down would fade away, and he dismissed the criticism as a standard part of the history of American combat since the Revolutionary War.

"This, too, will pass," Mr. Rumsfeld said during an interview with Rush Limbaugh, the conservative nationally syndicated radio host.

"So I'm here at the Pentagon doing my job, working on transformation and seeing that we manage the force in a successful way, and working on things involving Iraq," Mr. Rumsfeld said, according to a transcript posted on the radio program's Web site.

Mr. Rumsfeld and senior military commanders in Iraq are planning to meet Tuesday with a group of retired officers and civilian analysts as part of an effort by the Pentagon to stanch calls for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation from a half-dozen retired generals.

The retired officers and analysts invited to the Pentagon on Tuesday are among a group that appears frequently on television, and are invited regularly to meetings at the Defense Department, some of which have been addressed by Mr. Rumsfeld. Some of the television commentators and analysts have visited Iraq on trips organized by the Pentagon.

But the session on Tuesday is unusual in part because it will include remarks from commanders in Iraq, who will appear via satellite.

Pentagon officials may be hoping that putting forward senior civilian and military officials at the same time will demonstrate that relations at the top level remain unaffected by the recent calls for the defense secretary's resignation.

Topics for the closed session, scheduled to last several hours, include the war in Iraq and the broader campaign against terrorism, Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said on Monday.

Mr. Whitman described Tuesday's meeting as part of "a regular program" intended to provide the analysts and commentators with "factual information, statistics, to keep them in a position where they can add some value and context to the reporting."

In his radio interview, Mr. Rumsfeld said that those who had spoken out against him represented "the same kinds of criticism that occurred in the Revolutionary War and World War I and World War II and the Korean War, Vietnam War; it's not new."

While acknowledging that "wars are terrible things," Mr. Rumsfeld added, "On the other hand, if every time there were critics and opponents to war, we wouldn't have won the Revolutionary War and we wouldn't have been involved in World War I or II, and if we had, we would have failed, and our country would be a totally different place if it existed at all, if every time there were some critics that we tossed in the towel."

The effort to counter global terrorism is "a test of wills," Mr. Rumsfeld said, and cautioned that "if you started chasing, running around chasing public opinion polls or a handful of people who are critics of this or critics on that, you wouldn't get anywhere in this world."

Mr. Rumsfeld said "the sharper the criticism comes, sometimes the sharper the defense comes from people who don't agree with the critics."

Among retired officers who have recently spoken out on Mr. Rumsfeld's behalf are Gen. Richard B. Myers, who stepped down last year as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who headed the central command at the time of the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

    Rumsfeld Says Calls for Ouster 'Will Pass', NYT, 18.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/18/washington/18rumsfeld.html

General Defends Rumsfeld, With a Caveat

April 17, 2006
The New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG

WASHINGTON, April 16 — Gen. Richard B. Myers, who retired six months ago as the nation's top military officer, said Sunday that senior administration officials had been wrong to criticize the former Army chief publicly just before the invasion of Iraq for saying the mission could require a much larger force than was ultimately committed.

"He was inappropriately criticized, I believe, for speaking out," General Myers said in an interview on ABC, speaking of the former Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, who is retired.

General Myers's comment came with otherwise supportive words for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who is facing calls to resign from several retired generals, some of whom were involved in the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In other broadcast interviews, several Republican lawmakers also defended Mr. Rumsfeld and President Bush's decision to keep him as secretary, while some Democrats renewed calls that he step down.

General Myers, who was appointed with Mr. Rumsfeld's approval in 2001 and has emerged as one of his chief defenders, repeated his comments from last week that generals speaking out against the defense secretary are inappropriately breaching military etiquette, which dictates that officers discuss complaints with the civilian leadership privately.

But the interview was also the first time since his retirement that General Myers, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has publicly weighed in on the administration's handling of the statement in 2003 by General Shinseki. General Myers did not identify any of the senior civilian leaders, but his comment came in response to a question on statements about General Shinseki made by Mr. Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz.

The clash between General Shinseki and the civilian Pentagon leadership still rankles some of his former colleagues. And it goes to the heart of recent complaints that Mr. Rumsfeld and his top aides disregarded calls for more troops even before the invasion began.

General Shinseki, who commanded the NATO peacekeeping force in Bosnia, testified before Congress in February 2003 that peacekeeping operations in Iraq could require several hundred thousand troops, in part because it was a country with "the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems."

Days later, Mr. Wolfowitz, then the second-ranking official at the Pentagon, called the estimate "wildly off the mark," a sentiment that Mr. Rumsfeld repeated in comments that were widely interpreted in Washington and within the Pentagon as a rebuke of General Shinseki.

Mr. Wolfowitz also told Congress then that the force could be sufficiently smaller than General Shinseki had estimated because the Iraqis would welcome the Americans, and that unlike Bosnia, Iraq had no history of ethnic strife. Troops on the ground in Iraq have said recently that current sectarian strife there reminded them of the situation in the former Yugoslavia.

On Sunday, Brig. Gen. James Marks, a military analyst for CNN who has served in Iraq and is retired, said, "Clearly the presence of more combat forces on the ground would have been needed."

In remarks on CNN, General Marks said that he was under the impression that requests for more troops were being denied by Mr. Rumsfeld, and that he passed up an opportunity for promotion within the Pentagon in part because of how Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides had treated General Shinseki and others.

General Myers said he believed that news media coverage had overblown the confrontation and had failed to take note that General Shinseki had been "put in a corner" in questioning before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

"General Shinseki was forced to make that comment under pressure, pulled a number out, wasn't wedded to it," General Myers said. He also said General Shinseki did not push for more troops after giving his Congressional testimony.

In the current issue of Newsweek, General Shinseki, addressing criticism that he should have made a more aggressive case for more troops, is quoted as saying: "Probably that's fair. Not my style."

General Myers, speaking of the Pentagon reaction to General Shinseki's Congressional testimony, said: "Now, there were some mistakes made by, I think, some of the senior civilian leadership in taking General Shinseki on about that comment. I think that was wrong, and I've expressed those views."

A Pentagon spokesman, Eric Ruff, pointed to General Myers's critique as more evidence debunking recent criticism that dissent is unwelcome. "That comment reflects the kind of candor and straightforward approach that General Myers followed when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs," he said.

As for the debate over troop levels, Mr. Ruff said combat commanders and the Pentagon's senior uniformed leadership devised the war plan before sending it to Mr. Rumsfeld and his civilian aides for approval, disputing the notion that Mr. Rumsfeld was making top-down decisions.

General Myers, asked in the ABC interview whether he thought "it was a mistake not to follow the guidance of General Shinseki," responded that he did not.

"The judgment we got from academia, from anybody that wanted to make inputs, to include the National Security Council, was that we had the right number of troops," said General Myers, who also disputed accusations that he had been intimidated by Mr. Rumsfeld.

One of Mr. Rumsfeld's most ardent defenders on Sunday was Representative Duncan Hunter, a California Republican and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, who said Mr. Rumsfeld had done a good job under tough circumstances.

"This is a secretary of defense who is determined; that is a quality that you need at this time," Mr. Hunter said on CNN. "You don't change horses to simply give a cosmetic appeal to a situation which is a long, difficult and tough campaign."

Senator Richard G. Lugar, an Indiana Republican and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on ABC, "The president may decide finally to revamp his administration, but for the time being he has indicated Secretary Rumsfeld is going to be our secretary, and that's the call." Mr. Lugar said he considered it "a good call" because there were too many other pressing issues.

In an appearance on CBS, Senator George Allen, Republican of Virginia, said Mr. Rumsfeld's future should be up to Mr. Bush. Asked whether he believed that Mr. Rumsfeld had done a good job, Mr. Allen said, "I think he's executed, obviously, to the extent that the president wants him to execute."

Several Democrats maintained Sunday that Mr. Rumsfeld should resign. "I think the nation and this president would be well served if there were a change of team," Senator Dianne Feinstein of California said on CNN.

    General Defends Rumsfeld, With a Caveat, NYT, 17.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/17/washington/17military.html?hp&ex=1145332800&en=74ba6f98737d01b2&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Rumsfeld under renewed attack

Sun Apr 16, 2006 7:32 PM ET
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Senior Democrats sought to raise the heat on embattled Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Sunday as Republicans and the Pentagon came together to defend him and the way he has conducted the war in Iraq.

The battle of words over Rumsfeld, his relations with military leaders and the Iraq war followed unusual public calls in the past week for his resignation from six retired generals, which prompted a rebuke from the Pentagon.

"My view is that the secretary should step aside," New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a potential Democratic presidential candidate, told CBS's "Face the Nation" program. "Besides the fact that the Iraq war has been mismanaged ... we should listen to what these generals are saying."

Those urging Rumsfeld to step down include Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, and Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack, who led the Army's 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq, and former NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark.

"These are six distinguished military officers," Richardson said. "They basically are saying that Secretary Rumsfeld, on issues relating to military strategy ... didn't listen to them. ... This reaches a new level ... of not being willing to admit mistakes, not being willing to change a course, policy that is just not working."

Kentucky Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, speaking on "Fox News Sunday," said the United States had "wiped out a lot of the people who would do us harm" during Rumsfeld's tenure.

"I think the important thing to remember here is that we haven't been attacked again at home since September of 2001," McConnell said.

Retired Brig Gen. James Marks, speaking on CNN's "Late Edition," said of Rumsfeld in the early days of the war: "I kind of had the impression that his mind and those around him had been made up in terms of what we were going to do and how we were going to go about doing it. ... And there were requests for forces that were denied."

PENTAGON MEMORANDUM

The Pentagon on Sunday released the text of a memorandum it sent to civilian military analysts and former top military commanders, some of whom appear often on television, to challenge criticism that Rumsfeld was deaf to the views of military leaders. The memo's existence was first reported by The New York Times.

"U.S. senior military leaders are involved to an unprecedented degree in every decision-making process," the memorandum said in part, noting Rumsfeld had held 139 meetings with the Joint Chiefs of Staff since the start of 2005.

Republican Sen. George Allen of Virginia said on "Face the Nation" the criticism of Rumsfeld amounted to "scapegoating" and that firing him would not resolve the Iraq situation.

"What difference would that make?" he asked. "Would that mean anything to the terrorists? A lot of this focus on an individual is a way of maybe criticizing the president."

Sen. Christopher Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, said the critical comments from the retired generals could be considered a reflection of current senior officers not permitted to criticize Rumsfeld or Bush.

"We need a new direction in Iraq," he said. "We're looking at some incompetency in addition to the arrogance issues that have been raised. ... (Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice talked about a thousand tactical mistakes the other day in Iraq the other day. That's not exactly a ringing endorsement."

Richardson, who served in President Bill Clinton's Cabinet, said the continued high level of violence in Iraq and the failure to form a government in Baghdad suggests the U.S. presence in Iraq could be a detriment to U.S. objectives in the Middle East.

"What you're seeing is deep frustration in the military," he said, "deep frustration within our troops who are not getting enough armor. ... It is obvious that Secretary Rumsfeld did not listen to them. ... That's why we're in this morass."

    Rumsfeld under renewed attack, R, 16.4.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyid=2006-04-16T233231Z_01_N14306922_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-RUMSFELD.xml

Civilians Reign Over U.S. Military by Tradition and Design

April 16, 2006
The New York Times
By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, April 15 — This week, as the chorus of retired generals demanding Donald H. Rumsfeld's resignation grew larger and louder, Gen. Peter Pace stood beside the embattled defense secretary and did what some experts say was his military duty.

"As far as Pete Pace is concerned, this country is exceptionally well-served by the man standing on my left," General Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters at the Pentagon. "Nobody, nobody works harder than he does to take care of the Pfc.'s and lance corporals and lieutenants and the captains. He does his homework. He works weekends, he works nights.

"People can question my judgment or his judgment, but they should never question the dedication, the patriotism and the work ethic of Secretary Rumsfeld."

The generals' highly unusual assault on Mr. Rumsfeld reflects a widespread feeling in the uniformed military that the 73-year-old defense secretary is wrongheaded and arrogant.

To such critics, General Pace's endorsement may seem to be fulsome flattery. After all, some officers contend that Mr. Rumsfeld has promoted top leaders based largely on their fealty to him, his management of the war in Iraq and his ambitious plan to remake the military.

But the comments by General Pace of the Marines were more than a public plug for a boss under fire. Scholars who study the armed forces say they were a public restatement of a bedrock principle of American governance: civilian control of the military.

"This is what the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is expected to do by tradition and law," said Dennis E. Showalter, a military historian at Colorado College who has taught at the Air Force Academy and West Point. Short of submitting his own resignation, General Pace had little choice but to offer a public show of support, Mr. Showalter said.

"If he had not spoken out, he would have been making a very strong statement," he said.

The idea that civilian leaders, as representatives of the people, should have the ultimate say in how the country's military power is wielded dates to colonial resentment of British rule and is embedded in the Constitution.

Tensions between civilian leaders and the military brass are routine and occasionally erupt into public view. But the principle of civilian supremacy over the United States military has never been seriously challenged. In fact, Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice prescribes a court-martial for any commissioned officer who "uses contemptuous words against the president, the vice president, Congress, the secretary of defense" or other federal or state officials.

That prohibition, of course, does not forbid serving officers to speak candidly in private when asked for advice on military matters. Neither does the prohibition on "contemptuous words" apply to retirees.

"It's certainly very unusual to have even retired military officers being this public about their opposition," said Christopher F. Gelpi, a Duke University political scientist and co-author — with Peter D. Feaver, now a White House adviser — of a 2004 book on civil-military relations. "But I don't think it's improper at all. They've been careful not to violate the core tenet of civilian control — none of them has said these things publicly while on active duty."

Richard H. Kohn, a historian at the University of North Carolina who has studied the civilian control issue for 40 years, said that he largely agreed with the generals' view of the war and that he was sympathetic to what he called "a dam of anger and frustration bursting on the part of these senior retired people."

But Mr. Kohn said he found the criticisms disquieting. He was disturbed, he said, by an assertion made by Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, who retired from the Marines, in an essay for Time magazine, that he was writing "with the encouragement of some still in positions of military leadership."

"That's a fairly chilling thought," Mr. Kohn said. "Chilling because they're not supposed to be undermining their civilian leadership."

"It's not the military that holds the civilian leadership accountable," he said. "It's Congress, the voters, investigative journalists. Things have been turned upside down here."

Both Mr. Gelpi and Mr. Kohn said the generals' stance might erode Americans' belief that the military stands apart from politics. "One reason the military is so respected by the public is that military leaders are seen as nonpartisan and outside politics," Mr. Gelpi said.

Among earlier clashes between civilian and military leaders, historians inevitably point to Gen. Douglas MacArthur's challenge to President Harry S. Truman's conduct of the Korean War. In 1951, after MacArthur repeatedly criticized White House policy, Truman removed him from command and ordered him back to the United States.

Truman initially paid a heavy political price for taking on the popular general. "There was talk of impeachment," Mr. Kohn said. "Truman's approval numbers were in the 20's. He was under enormous assault."

Civilian-military clashes were far less pronounced during the Vietnam War, which was a formative experience for many current senior officers, including General Pace, who led a rifle platoon at the Battle of Hue in 1968.

But the very failure of military leaders to challenge President Lyndon B. Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and other top civilians over that war has haunted some of the generals now speaking out.

"If the military is always fighting the last war, well, in the last big war, in Vietnam, the generals stayed quiet and that's now seen as a mistake," said Mr. Showalter, of Colorado College.

More recently, President Bill Clinton, who never served in the military and actively opposed the Vietnam War, came to office facing barely disguised hostility from many military officers.

By moving quickly to fulfill his campaign pledge to end the ban on gay men and lesbians in the military, Mr. Clinton provoked near rebellion among the uniformed services.

Gen. Colin L. Powell, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time, was outspoken and quite public in his opposition, saying that opening the door to gay men and lesbians would undermine "good order and discipline."

The current "don't ask, don't tell" policy emerged as a compromise, but the services' challenge was also among the factors that prompted Les Aspin to step down as Mr. Clinton's defense secretary after a short tenure.

Mr. Showalter said several factors had set the stage for the retired generals' current challenge. Many retired officers have found a place as commentators on television, and some have shared their views in books. The current generation of senior leaders is the best educated in history, he said, and some officers are intellectuals who are less willing than an earlier generation to keep quiet about policy disagreements.

Still, Mr. Showalter said, it is worth asking, "What's the risk to civilian control of the military when recently retired officers — who didn't lay down their stars and resign when they were serving — call for the resignation of the secretary of defense?"

    Civilians Reign Over U.S. Military by Tradition and Design, NYT, 16.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/washington/16generals.html

Pentagon Memo Aims to Counter Rumsfeld Critics

April 16, 2006
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI and JIM RUTENBERG

WASHINGTON, April 15 — The Defense Department has issued a memorandum to a group of former military commanders and civilian analysts that offers a direct challenge to the criticisms made by retired generals about Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

The one-page memorandum was sent by e-mail on Friday to the group, which includes several retired generals who appear regularly on television, and came as the Bush administration stepped up its own defense of Mr. Rumsfeld. On the political front, Republican strategists voiced rising anxiety on Saturday that without a major change in the course of the Iraq war, Republican candidates would suffer dearly in the November elections.

The memorandum begins by stating, "U.S. senior military leaders are involved to an unprecedented degree in every decision-making process in the Department of Defense." It says Mr. Rumsfeld has had 139 meetings with the Joint Chiefs of Staff since the start of 2005 and 208 meetings with the senior field commanders.

Seeking to put the criticism of the relatively small number of retired generals into context, the e-mail message also notes that there are more than 8,000 active-duty and retired general officers alive today.

The message was released Friday by the Pentagon's office of the Directorate for Programs and Community Relations and Public Liaison, but it was unclear who wrote it.

It is not uncommon for the Pentagon to send such memorandums to this group of officers, whom they consider to be influential in shaping public opinion. But it is unusual for the Pentagon to issue guidance that can be used by retired generals to rebut the arguments of other retired generals.

The memorandum quickly followed President Bush's statement on Friday in which he gave a strong endorsement of Mr. Rumsfeld.

The memorandum spoke directly to the thrust of the retired generals' complaints that Mr. Rumsfeld was a "micromanager" who often ignored the advice of military commanders.

The group that received the message was made up of both staunch Bush administration supporters and some who have been critical of administration policies. They are brought in periodically to consult with Pentagon officials and were notified on Friday that Mr. Rumsfeld wanted to meet with them this Tuesday.

A Defense Department spokesman, Eric Ruff, called the memorandum a "fact sheet" that was developed to provide detailed information to an influential group of analysts. In no way was it meant to enlist retired officers to speak out on behalf of Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Ruff said.

"The fact sheet was sent out to provide people with the facts," he said. "We would be doing a disservice to the analysts and the American public if we didn't provide exactly what the facts are."

One retired general who regularly attends the Pentagon meetings said Saturday that he found it unusual for the Pentagon to send such a memorandum in the middle of a heated debate, because it was almost certain to appear politically motivated.

"I think it's part of the charm offensive," said the general, who was granted anonymity because he said he was afraid he would not be invited to future Pentagon sessions.

For a president who has responded to critics of the war by saying he takes his cue from commanders in the field, not politicians in Washington, the past week has put the White House in an uncomfortable position. Administration officials acknowledged that unlike past criticisms from lawmakers, the comments by the generals — who say they have only military objectives in mind — could carry extra weight.

Consequently, administration officials were quick to note that supportive generals were stepping forward to give television interviews. They indicated that they were far more comfortable seeing retired generals fight it out on the airwaves rather than having to debate uniformed war critics themselves from the civilian confines of the White House.

Hours after the president released his statement Friday, two prominent retired generals, Richard B. Myers and Tommy Franks, moved to defend Mr. Rumsfeld. General Myers also criticized the former commanders who had called for his ouster. But the men are not part of the group of retired officers who were the main recipients of the memorandum.

The memorandum states that the secretary of defense meets four times a week with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and goes on to note that he also "meets approximately twice each year with individual service chiefs to review general/flag officer personnel assignments and planning to the two-star officer level."

The retired generals' critical comments have come as the White House has tried to buoy support for the war.

On Saturday, Gen. Wesley K. Clark became the latest retired officer to call for the resignation of Mr. Rumsfeld. General Clark, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004.

White House and Republican strategists have identified the war as the single largest reason for the president's sinking approval ratings and say it is adding to the challenges facing Congressional Republicans in the midterm elections.

On Saturday morning, two Republicans with close ties to the White House said that they were deeply concerned about the situation and that Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation could help improve the party's prospects for the November elections.

Both men were granted anonymity because they feared that speaking publicly would damage their relations with the White House. They also said they would be surprised if Mr. Bush did force Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation, because he had tended to stand by his top aides in the face of public criticism.

A senior Republican Congressional adviser who was granted anonymity for the same reason said of the war: "There needs to be signals sent — major signals — that some things are going to be different. That could, or should, mean that changes must be made. If not, and things go exactly the way they are, our candidates will pay a dear price."

Representative Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican whose campaign opponent has made Mr. Shays's support for the war an issue, said Saturday that he believed his prospects would be brighter if Mr. Rumsfeld were to go, though he has not called for his resignation.

"Do I think someone else would do a better job, and if someone else would do a better job, does it help me?" said Mr. Shays, who has previously criticized the conduct of the war. "Of course it would."

Mr. Rumsfeld still enjoys support in many Republican circles. Senator John Cornyn of Texas, a Republican member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said his resignation would be a mistake.

"If this were to happen," Mr. Cornyn said, "it would encourage demands for other members of the cabinet or other people close to the president to resign." Echoing administration officials, he said some good news out of Iraq could go a long way toward quieting critics.

Adam Nagourney contributed reporting from New York for this article.

    Pentagon Memo Aims to Counter Rumsfeld Critics, NYT, 16.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/washington/16rumsfeld.html?hp&ex=1145246400&en=80490becc6fc560d&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Rumsfeld critics off base: ex-military chief

Sat Apr 15, 2006 5:24 PM ET
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Calls from a growing number of retired US generals for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to resign over his handling of the Iraq war are inappropriate, former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers said on Saturday.

Six former generals, joined on Saturday by former NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark, have spoken out against Rumsfeld, accusing him of arrogance, ignoring his field commanders and micromanagement. The calls come amid growing fears of a civil war in Iraq and slumping approval ratings for President George W. Bush.

"I don't think it's our place in the military either in uniform or when you retire to make those judgments. That's not the military's role. They certainly can. It's their right to do that, I just think it's inappropriate," Myers told Fox News.

Clark, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, disagreed with Myers.

"It's more than appropriate, it's their responsibility," he told Fox news. "I believe Rumsfeld hasn't done an adequate job. He should go."

Bush took time out from his Easter holiday on Friday to express support for Rumsfeld and to counter the growing chorus calling for him to step down.

"Secretary Rumsfeld's energetic and steady leadership is exactly what is needed at this critical period. He has my full support and deepest appreciation," Bush said in a statement.

Rumsfeld dismissed the resignation calls in an interview with Al Arabiya television aired on Friday. "Out of thousands and thousands of admirals and generals, if every time two or three people disagreed we changed the secretary of defense of the United States it would be like a merry-go-round," he said.

Clark said Rumsfeld's failure to heed the advice of senior officers was a major complaint and that the disaffection extends beyond the generals who have spoken out.

"Now these officers are saying at least give us somebody in the military chain of command who will listen. That's why Secretary Rumsfeld has lost their confidence. He's made bad policy choices. It's time for new leadership."

Myers, who retired last year, said he never heard the complaints being expressed against Rumsfeld during the four years he spent as America's highest-ranking military officer.

"What I'm hearing now I never heard as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff," Myers said.

He said a shake-up led by Rumsfeld to make the Pentagon a more flexible organization could be one of the reasons for the disenchantment among the former senior officers.

One early US newspaper editorial dismissed the White House effort to save Rumsfeld's job.

"The ritual White House public relations offensive is wearing thin, especially when the people calling for Rumsfeld's resignation this time wore so many stars on their uniforms," the St. Petersburg Times said in an editorial on Saturday.

"The damage in Iraq is already done, but his (Rumsfeld's) continued tenure is now threatening to harm and politicize the military," it said.

    Rumsfeld critics off base: ex-military chief, R, 15.4.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=topNews&storyid=2006-04-15T212422Z_01_N14306922_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-RUMSFELD.xml

Rumsfeld Gets Robust Defense From President

April 15, 2006
The New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, April 14 — President Bush strongly endorsed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Friday, in an effort to quell widening criticism from retired generals who have urged Mr. Rumsfeld to resign.

"Secretary Rumsfeld's energetic and steady leadership is exactly what is needed at this critical period," the president's statement read. "He has my full support and deepest appreciation."

The statement, issued as Mr. Bush interrupted a family holiday at Camp David, was part of a strong effort by the White House to fend off criticism of the handling of the war that has come from six retired generals, several of whom were involved in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The generals are weighing in as polls show support for the war waning significantly in an election year.

Mr. Bush's statement was followed hours later by supportive comments from Gen. Richard B. Myers, the retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the retired commander of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both appeared on cable news programs, and General Myers pointedly criticized former colleagues for publicly questioning civilian leadership.

Mr. Rumsfeld appeared Friday on an Al Arabiya television broadcast and said, "Out of thousands and thousands of admirals and generals, if every time two or three people disagreed we changed the secretary of defense of the United States, it would be like a merry-go-round."

It was not clear how far the counterattack by Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld might go to quiet the calls from the generals or to mollify members of Congress who have begun citing the retired officers' complaints as validation of their own critiques of the war.

A request for comment from the office of Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, drew only an equivocal response. "Senator Warner believes that the decision of whether to keep Secretary Rumsfeld is up to the president," said a spokesman for Mr. Warner, John Ullyot.

Senator Jack Reed, the Rhode Island Democrat who is on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he expected more retired officers to speak out against Mr. Rumsfeld.

"Does this chorus become more pronounced? I think that might happen," Mr. Reed said.

The White House has generally tried to avoid commenting on what it refers to as "personnel matters." But Friday was only one of several occasions during Mr. Bush's presidency in which he has gone out of his way to voice support for his defense secretary, who has sparred with segments of the Pentagon establishment virtually from the moment he took office.

In defending Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Bush seemed to have been asserting his standing as commander in chief, sending a signal to the generals that criticizing the defense secretary is the equivalent of criticizing his own stewardship of the war. Administration officials said Mr. Bush took the strong move of issuing the statement from Camp David on Good Friday because he was concerned that the retired generals were sending mixed messages to the battlefield.

Associates of Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Bush said critics would be mistaken to believe that Mr. Rumsfeld would resign in reaction to external pressure, noting that both men had only hardened their positions in the face of vocal opposition in the past.

A senior White House official, who was granted anonymity to speak freely about a highly charged political issue, described Mr. Bush as being "very proactive" in deciding to make a statement, saying that he was prompted to act because he recognized that the prominent backgrounds of the retired generals now leveling the criticism had potentially added heft to their comments.

The official said Mr. Bush called Mr. Rumsfeld about 10 a.m. from Camp David — where the president is with his family, including his parents — telling him of his decision and affirming his support yet again.

The conversation represented familiar ground for the two. Criticism became so heated during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq during the 2004 presidential election that Mr. Rumsfeld twice offered his resignation, he has said.

Mr. Bush rejected the offers and made a public show of support in June 2004 by telling Mr. Rumsfeld before a group of reporters, "You are a strong secretary of defense, and our nation owes you a debt of gratitude." Military officials have said that Mr. Rumsfeld, 73, has not repeated that offer to resign in response to the retired generals' criticisms.

White House officials again made a concerted effort to show support for Mr. Rumsfeld in December 2004, after Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, said they had no confidence in Mr. Rumsfeld.

Those comments were a blow to the administration because they came from respected members of the president's own party, as opposed to liberal political groups like MoveOn.org, or Democrats, for that matter. But the retired generals now stepping forward represent a whole new class of critic.

Far from being daunted, one of them, Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., who commanded the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq as recently as 2004, went further in his criticisms during a telephone interview on Friday. He said the number of forces that went into Iraq was insufficient for the ultimate task and said of Mr. Rumsfeld, "His arrogance is what will cause us to fail in the future."

But late Friday new allies took to cable news to defend the administration.

On CNN, General Myers said he regretted that the retired generals were speaking out. "My whole perception of this is that it's bad for the military, it's bad for civil-military relations, and it's potentially very bad for the country, because what we are hearing and what we are seeing is not the role the military plays in our society," he said.

General Franks said on MSNBC that Mr. Rumsfeld was a "pretty successful secretary of defense" whose managerial style ruffled feathers.

Administration officials seemed to be hoping that the debate could move to one between generals and cease to be one involving the White House, which has seemed uncomfortable publicly taking on military brass.

But the senior administration official said the president was not deaf to complaints about Mr. Rumsfeld. "He is fully cognizant of the controversy that surrounds Secretary Rumsfeld's tenure," the official said. "But that often happens when you are tasked with doing very difficult things."

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting for this article.

    Rumsfeld Gets Robust Defense From President, NYT, 15.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/15/washington/15rumsfeld.html?hp&ex=1145160000&en=cceef4ccbbf294e9&ei=5094&partner=homepage

President Bush Expresses Full Support, Appreciation for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld

The White House
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
April 14, 2006

Earlier today I spoke with Don Rumsfeld about ongoing military operations in the Global War on Terror. I reiterated my strong support for his leadership during this historic and challenging time for our Nation.

The Department of Defense has been tasked with many difficult missions. Upon assuming office, I asked Don to transform the largest department in our government. That kind of change is hard, but our Nation must have a military that is fully prepared to confront the dangerous threats of the 21st Century. Don and our military commanders have also been tasked to take the fight to the enemy abroad on multiple fronts.

I have seen first-hand how Don relies upon our military commanders in the field and at the Pentagon to make decisions about how best to complete these missions. Secretary Rumsfeld's energetic and steady leadership is exactly what is needed at this critical period. He has my full support and deepest appreciation.

    President Bush Expresses Full Support, Appreciation for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, The White House, 14.4.2006, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/04/20060414.html

Report says Rumsfeld allowed Guantanamo abuse

Fri Apr 14, 2006 6:17 PM ET
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld allowed an "abusive and degrading" interrogation of an al Qaeda detainee in 2002, the online magazine Salon reported on Friday, citing an Army document.

In a report a Pentagon spokesman denounced as "fiction," Salon quoted a December 2005 Army inspector general's report in which officers told of Rumsfeld's direct contact with the general overseeing the interrogation at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The report at www.salon.com, titled "What Rumsfeld Knew," comes amid calls by a string of respected military commanders for the Pentagon chief to resign to take responsibility for U.S. military setbacks in Iraq.

Rumsfeld spoke regularly to Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, a key figure in the treatment of detainees in Iraq and Guantanamo, during the interrogation of Mohammed al-Kahtani, a Saudi suspected to have been an intended September 11 hijacker, the Salon report said.

Kahtani received "degrading and abusive" treatment by soldiers who were following the interrogation plan Rumsfeld had approved, Salon said, quoting the 391-page report, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

Over 54 days in late 2002, soldiers forced Kahtani to stand naked in front of a female interrogator, accused him of being a homosexual, forced him to wear women's underwear and made him perform "dog tricks" on a leash, the Salon report said.

Salon cited Lt. Gen. Randall Schmidt, an Army investigator, as saying in a sworn statement to the inspector general that "The secretary of defense is personally involved in the interrogation of one person."

Schmidt is quoted as saying under oath that he concluded Rumsfeld did not specifically order the interrogation methods used on Kahtani, but that his approval of broad policies permitted abuses to take place.

Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, dismissed the report's allegation that Rumsfeld or the defense department condoned abuse.

"We've gone over this countless times and yet some still choose to print fiction versus facts," Gordon said by telephone.

"Twelve major reviews, to include one done by an independent panel, all confirm the Department of Defense did not have a policy that encouraged or condoned abuse. To suggest otherwise is simply false."

Schmidt, an Air Force fighter pilot, was quoted as telling the inspector general he had concerns about the length and repetition of the harsh interrogation methods, which he likened to abuses later uncovered at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

"There were no limits," Schmidt is quoted as telling the inspector general in an August 2005 interview.

The Pentagon has said Kahtani gave interrogators information on al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's health and methods of evading capture as well as the group's infiltration routes.

Miller -- who headed the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, helped shape detention practices at Abu Ghraib and later oversaw all detention operations in Iraq -- in January invoked his right not to incriminate himself in the courts martial of soldiers tried for Abu Ghraib abuses.

In an interview with Dubai's Al Arabiya television aired on Friday, Rumsfeld acknowledged the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and said that soldiers had been punished for that.

"It's something that should not have happened, it did happen, and we regret it deeply," he said.

    Report says Rumsfeld allowed Guantanamo abuse, R, 14.4.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=topNews&storyid=2006-04-14T221703Z_01_N14306922_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-RUMSFELD.xml

The new breed of soldier: Robots with guns

Updated 4/14/2006 12:19 AM ET
USA TODAY
By Steven Komarow

Spurred by the risks from roadside bombs and terrorist ambushes, the military is aggressively seeking to replace troops with battlefield robots, including new versions armed with machine guns.

"There was a time just a few years ago when we almost had to beg people to try an unmanned ground vehicle," says Marine Col. Terry Griffin, manager of the Robotic Systems Joint Project Office in Huntsville, Ala. "We don't have to beg anymore."

UAVs sniff out IEDS:Eyes in the sky needed to spot lethal explosives on the ground

Although the Pentagon initially focused on aircraft, such as the Predator drone, now new ground- and sea-based robots are being developed and tested, military records show. For example:

•The Mobile Detection Assessment Response System, an unmanned vehicle intended to patrol around domestic bases. The Army plans to start using it next year.

•Self-driving convoy trucks. Some variants follow preplanned routes or the vehicle in front. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has held a competition among advanced, satellite-guided versions that plan their own routes and maneuver around roadblocks. The Army is testing driverless versions of its Stryker armored personnel carrier.

•Robots that can enter a building, look for an enemy and send back a map of the interior are being tested for the Marine Corps.

Already in Iraq and Afghanistan are hundreds of small robots to help bomb squads examine or disarm explosives from a safe distance. That's because of the continuing toll caused by improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which have been become the largest killer of U.S. troops.

Ninety-five U.S. troops in Iraq have been killed by IEDs in 2006 through April 9, according to military records and the USA TODAY Iraq casualty database. That's 57% of the 167 U.S. fatalities in Iraq during that period.

Records kept by U.S. Central Command, which directs troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, show the number of IED attacks increased 89% in 2005 to 10,593, compared with 5,607 in 2004.

To better detect and stop IEDs, new sensors are being attached to those robots, says Dave Greene of the Army's Test and Evaluation Command, which evaluates the performance of robots and other technologies.

The military also is responding to some creative tinkering by the troops, who have modified their robots to carry grenades and other weapons into buildings or other potentially unsafe targets.

"Soldiers and Marines are very innovative and ... have figured out how to do that," Griffin says.

As a result, the Pentagon is testing a new version of the Talon robot that carries a remote-control M-240 machine gun.

Meanwhile, much larger and more ambitious robot weapons are in testing, including a tank-like, 1,600-pound vehicle called the Gladiator, which can fire a variety of guns, tear gas or almost anything else that fits. It also has loudspeakers to "shout" instructions, such as those to calm a mob.

Those armed robots are like the Predator, which fires only with a human command. The next step — robots that decide themselves when to fire — is much harder.

Robots will become more independent, but having them fight without human control is "not a technology issue, so much as it's a safety issue," says Scott Myers, president of General Dynamics Robotic Systems.

A robot can find a human with its sensors and kill the person, but "we don't want to shoot our own people or children," Myers says. It's hard enough for a human to distinguish between friend and foe, and for machines, "we're a long way from being there."

The goal now is helping troops in the field as quickly as possible, says Col. Gregory Tubbs, head of the Army's Rapid Equipping Force. In the long term, Tubbs says, the Gladiator and other robots will be transitional, as the military shifts to "game changing" robotic technologies that will revolutionize warfare.

    The new breed of soldier: Robots with guns, UT, 14.4.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2006-04-13-robot-soldiers_x.htm

More Retired Generals Call for Rumsfeld's Resignation        NYT        14.4.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/14/washington/14military.html?hp&ex=1145073600&en=bdbb556e9e293705&ei=5094&partner=homepage

More Retired Generals Call for Rumsfeld's Resignation

April 14, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID S. CLOUD and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, April 13 — The widening circle of retired generals who have stepped forward to call for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's resignation is shaping up as an unusual outcry that could pose a significant challenge to Mr. Rumsfeld's leadership, current and former generals said on Thursday.

Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., who led troops on the ground in Iraq as recently as 2004 as the commander of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division, on Thursday became the fifth retired senior general in recent days to call publicly for Mr. Rumsfeld's ouster. Also Thursday, another retired Army general, Maj. Gen. John Riggs, joined in the fray.

"We need to continue to fight the global war on terror and keep it off our shores," General Swannack said in a telephone interview. "But I do not believe Secretary Rumsfeld is the right person to fight that war based on his absolute failures in managing the war against Saddam in Iraq."

Another former Army commander in Iraq, Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who led the First Infantry Division, publicly broke ranks with Mr. Rumsfeld on Wednesday. Mr. Rumsfeld long ago became a magnet for political attacks. But the current uproar is significant because Mr. Rumsfeld's critics include generals who were involved in the invasion and occupation of Iraq under the defense secretary's leadership.

There were indications on Thursday that the concern about Mr. Rumsfeld, rooted in years of pent-up anger about his handling of the war, was sweeping aside the reticence of retired generals who took part in the Iraq war to criticize an enterprise in which they participated. Current and former officers said they were unaware of any organized campaign to seek Mr. Rumsfeld's ouster, but they described a blizzard of telephone calls and e-mail messages as retired generals critical of Mr. Rumsfeld weighed the pros and cons of joining in the condemnation.

Even as some of their retired colleagues spoke out publicly about Mr. Rumsfeld, other senior officers, retired and active alike, had to be promised anonymity before they would discuss their own views of why the criticism of him was mounting. Some were concerned about what would happen to them if they spoke openly, others about damage to the military that might result from amplifying the debate, and some about talking outside of channels, which in military circles is often viewed as inappropriate.

The White House has dismissed the criticism, saying it merely reflects tensions over the war in Iraq. There was no indication that Mr. Rumsfeld was considering resigning.

"The president believes Secretary Rumsfeld is doing a very fine job during a challenging period in our nation's history," the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, told reporters on Thursday.

Among the retired generals who have called for Mr. Rumsfeld's ouster, some have emphasized that they still believe it was right for the United States to invade Iraq. But a common thread in their complaints has been an assertion that Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides too often inserted themselves unnecessarily into military decisionmaking, often disregarding advice from military commanders.

The outcry also appears based in part on a coalescing of concern about the toll that the war is taking on American armed forces, with little sign, three years after the invasion, that United States troops will be able to withdraw in large numbers anytime soon.

Pentagon officials, while acknowledging that Mr. Rumsfeld's forceful style has sometimes ruffled his military subordinates, played down the idea that he was overriding the advice of his military commanders or ignoring their views.

His interaction with military commanders has "been frequent," said Lawrence Di Rita, a top aide to Mr. Rumsfeld.

"It's been intense," Mr. Di Rita said, "but always there's been ample opportunity for military judgment to be applied against the policies of the United States."

Some retired officers, however, said they believed the momentum was turning against Mr. Rumsfeld.

"Are the floodgates opening?" asked one retired Army general, who drew a connection between the complaints and the fact that President Bush's second term ends in less than three years. "The tide is changing, and folks are seeing the end of this administration."

No active duty officers have joined the call for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation. In interviews, some currently serving general officers expressed discomfort with the campaign against Mr. Rumsfeld, which has been spearheaded by, among others, Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, who headed the United States Central Command in the late 1990's before retiring from the Marine Corps. Some of the currently serving officers said they feared the debate risked politicizing the military and undercutting its professional ethos.

Some say privately they disagree with aspects of the Bush administration's handling of the war. But many currently serving officers, regardless of their views, say respect for civilian control of the military requires that they air differences of opinion in private and stay silent in public.

"I support my secretary of defense," Lt. General John Vines, who commands the Army's 18th Airborne Corps, said when questioned after a speech in Washington on Thursday about the calls for Mr. Rumsfeld to step down. "If I publicly disagree with my civilian leadership, I think I've got to resign. My advice should be private."

Some of the tensions between Mr. Rumsfeld and the uniformed military services date back to his arrival at the Pentagon in early 2001. Mr. Rumsfeld's assertion of greater civilian control over the military and his calls for a slimmer, faster force were viewed with mistrust by many senior officers, while his aggressive, sometimes abrasive style also earned him enmity.

Mr. Rumsfeld's critics often point to his treatment of Gen. Eric Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, who told Congress a month before the 2003 invasion of Iraq that occupying the country could require "several hundred thousand troops," rather than the smaller force that was later provided. General Shinseki's estimate was publicly dismissed by Pentagon officials.

"Rumsfeld has been contemptuous of the views of senior military officers since the day he walked in as secretary of defense. It's about time they got sick and tired," Thomas E. White, the former Army secretary, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. Mr. White was forced out of his job by Mr. Rumsfeld in April of 2003.

Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold of the Marine Corps, who retired in late 2002, has said he regarded the American invasion of Iraq unnecessary. He issued his call for replacing Mr. Rumsfeld in an essay in the current edition of Time magazine. General Newbold said he regretted not opposing the invasion of Iraq more vigorously, and called the invasion peripheral to the job of defeating Al Qaeda.

General Swannack, by contrast, continues to support the invasion but said that Mr. Rumsfeld had micromanaged the war in Iraq, rather than leaving it to senior commanders there, including Gen. George W. Casey Jr. of the Army, the top American officer in Iraq, and Gen. John P. Abizaid of the Army, the top officer in the Middle East. "My belief is Rumsfeld does not really understand the dynamic of counterinsurgency warfare," General Swannack said.

The string of retired generals calling for Rumsfeld's removal has touched off a vigorous debate within the ranks of both active-duty and retired generals and admirals.

Some officers who have worked closely with Mr. Rumsfeld reject the idea that he is primarily to blame for the inability of American forces to defeat the insurgency in Iraq. One active-duty, four-star Army officer said he had not heard among his peers widespread criticism of Mr. Rumsfeld, and said he thought the criticism from his retired colleagues was off base. "They are entitled to their views, but I believe them to be wrong. And it is unfortunate they have allowed themselves to become in some respects, politicized."

Gen. Jack Keane, who was Army vice chief of staff in 2003 before retiring, said in the planning of the Iraq invasion, senior officers as much as the Pentagon's civilian leadership underestimated the threat of a long-term insurgency.

"There's shared responsibility here. I don't think you can blame the civilian leadership alone," he said.

Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, a retired Army general, called for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation in March.

The criticism of Mr. Rumsfeld may spring from multiple motives. General Zinni, for example, is in the middle of a tour promoting a new book critical of the Bush administration.

General Riggs, who called for Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation in an interview on Thursday with National Public Radio, left the Pentagon in 2004 after clashing with civilian leaders and then being investigated for potential misuse of contractor personnel.

But there were also signs that the spate of retired generals calling for Mr. Rumsfeld's departure was not finished. Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, who is retired from the Marine Corps, said in an interview Thursday he had received a telephone call from another retired general who was weighing whether to publicly join the calls for Mr. Rumsfeld's dismissal.

"He was conflicted, and when I hung up I didn't know which way he was going to go," General Van Riper said.

Thom Shanker contributed reporting for this article.

    More Retired Generals Call for Rumsfeld's Resignation, NYT, 14.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/14/washington/14military.html?hp&ex=1145073600&en=bdbb556e9e293705&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Retired US Iraq general demands Rumsfeld resign

Wed Apr 12, 2006 2:44 PM ET
Reuters
By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A recently retired two-star general who just a year ago commanded a U.S. Army division in Iraq on Wednesday joined a small but growing list of former senior officers to call on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to resign.

"I believe we need a fresh start in the Pentagon. We need a leader who understands teamwork, a leader who knows how to build teams, a leader that does it without intimidation," Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who commanded the Germany-based 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, said in an interview on CNN.

In recent weeks, retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton and Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni all spoke out against Rumsfeld. This comes as opinion polls show eroding public support for the 3-year-old war in which about 2,360 U.S. troops have died.

"You know, it speaks volumes that guys like me are speaking out from retirement about the leadership climate in the Department of Defense," Batiste said.

"But when decisions are made without taking into account sound military recommendations, sound military decision making, sound planning, then we're bound to make mistakes."

Batiste, a West Point graduate who also served during the previous Gulf War, retired from the Army on November 1, 2005. While in Iraq, his division, nicknamed the Big Red One, was based in Tikrit, and it wrapped up a yearlong deployment in May 2005.

Critics have accused Rumsfeld of bullying senior military officers and disregarding their views. They often cite how Rumsfeld dismissed then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki's opinion a month before the 2003 invasion that occupying Iraq could require "several hundred thousand troops," not the smaller force Rumsfeld would send.

Many experts believe that the chaos that ensued and the insurgency that emerged just months later vindicated Shinseki's view.

Batiste told CNN "we've got the best military in the world, hands down, period." He did not say whether he felt the war was winnable.

'LACK OF SACRIFICE'

"Whether we agree or not with the war in Iraq, we are where we are, and we must succeed in this endeavor. Failure is frankly not an option," Batiste said.

Batiste said he was struck by the "lack of sacrifice and commitment on the part of the American people" to the war, with the exception of families with soldiers fighting in Iraq.

"I think that our executive and legislative branches of government have a responsibility to mobilize this country for war. They frankly have not done so. We're mortgaging our future, our children, $8 to $9 billion a month," he said, referring to the cost of the war.

He defined success in the war as "setting the Iraqi people up for self-reliance with their form of representative government that takes into account tribal, ethnic and religious differences that have always defined Iraqi society."

"Iraqis, frankly, in my experience, do not understand democracy. Nor do they understand their responsibilities for a free society," Batiste said.

Newbold, the military's top operations officer before the Iraq war, said in a Time magazine opinion piece on Sunday that he regretted having not more openly challenged U.S. leaders who took the United States into "an unnecessary war" in Iraq. Newbold encouraged officers still in the military to voice any doubts they have about the war.

On Tuesday, Marine Corps Gen. Pete Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defended Rumsfeld from the criticism.

Rumsfeld said that "there's nothing wrong with people having opinions," and that criticism should be expected during a war as controversial as this one.

    Retired US Iraq general demands Rumsfeld resign, R, 12.4.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyid=2006-04-12T184439Z_01_N12340006_RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAQ-USA-GENERAL.xml

Army exceeds lowered target for recruiting through March

Updated 4/11/2006 1:45 AM ET
USA TODAY
By Tom Vanden Brook

WASHINGTON — The Army is ahead of its midyear goal for signing up new soldiers, the Pentagon said Monday.
Through March 2006, the first six months of the government's fiscal year, the Army had attracted 31,369 new soldiers, compared with a goal of 30,300.

This year's goal was nearly 5,700 soldiers lower than the target for the same period in 2005. The Army, which has suffered the most casualties in the Iraq war, expects strong recruiting this summer, said Douglas Smith, a spokesman for the Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox in Kentucky.

The Army will have to meet its goals while having its smallest "delayed entry" pool in years.

Delayed-entry recruits sign contracts to join the Army and enter the service at a later date. That's done for their convenience or for the Army, which can tap the pool as needed to bolster its ranks.

There were 9,900 recruits in the 2006 delayed-entry pool, compared with more than 14,500 in 2005 and 33,200 in 2004.

At this point last year, the Army had recruited 32,105 new soldiers, or 10.8% behind its goal. Recruiting improved during the second half of that year, and the Army finished 8% behind its yearly goal of 80,000 recruits, which is the same goal for all of fiscal 2006.

The Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy met or exceeded their recruiting goals, the Pentagon said Monday. Only the Army and Navy reserves failed to hit their targets.

"The Air Force and Navy have had no problems" with recruiting during the war, said Loren Thompson, a military expert at the Lexington Institute, a think tank in Arlington, Va., that focuses on military issues.

The Army, Thompson said, has the biggest wartime and recruiting burdens. Through Monday, 2,347 U.S. servicemembers had been killed in the Iraq war, Pentagon records show; 1,602 were Army soldiers.

Higher recruiting bonuses, Thompson said, also help explain the Army's success this year.

Monday's recruiting figures follow the success the Army has reported in retaining soldiers. For the first six months of fiscal 2006, the Army exceeded its re-enlistment goal of 34,668 by 15%.

    Army exceeds lowered target for recruiting through March, UT, 11.4.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-04-10-army-recruiting_x.htm

Young Officers Leaving Army at a High Rate

April 10, 2006
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON, April 9 — Young Army officers, including growing numbers of captains who leave as soon as their initial commitment is fulfilled, are bailing out of active-duty service at rates that have alarmed senior officers. Last year, more than a third of the West Point class of 2000 left active duty at the earliest possible moment, after completing their five-year obligation.

It was the second year in a row of worsening retention numbers, apparently marking the end of a burst of patriotic fervor during which junior officers chose continued military service at unusually high rates.

Mirroring the problem among West Pointers, graduates of reserve officer training programs at universities are also increasingly leaving the service at the end of the four-year stint in uniform that follows their commissioning.

To entice more to stay, the Army is offering new incentives this year, including a promise of graduate school on Army time and at government expense to newly commissioned officers who agree to stay in uniform for three extra years. Other enticements include the choice of an Army job or a pick of a desirable location for a home post.

The incentives resulted in additional three-year commitments from about one-third of all new officers entering active duty in 2006, a number so large that it surprised even the senior officers in charge of the program. But the service's difficulty in retaining current captains has generals worriedly discussing among themselves whether the Army will have the widest choice possible for its next generation of leaders.

The program was begun this year to counter pressures on junior officers to leave active duty, including the draw of high-paying jobs in the private sector; the desires of a spouse for a calmer civilian quality of life at a time when the officers can be expected to be starting their families; and, for the past two years, the concerns over repeated tours in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Army has had a far more difficult time in its recruiting than the other services because the ground forces are carrying the heaviest burden of deployments — and injuries and deaths — in the war.

One member of the West Point class of 2000 who left active duty last year is Stephen Kuo, who took a job with a medical equipment company in Florida. Mr. Kuo said his decision was based on "quality of life." He is now recruiting classmates for his company.

"With the rotation of one year overseas, then another year or so back at home, then another overseas rotation — it does take a toll on you," said Mr. Kuo, who served a year in combat in northern Iraq. "Plus, I was not enjoying the staff jobs — desk jobs — I was looking at for the next 8 to 10 years. Furthermore, the private sector had many lucrative offers."

But the chance at a free master's degree persuaded Brandon J. Archuleta, a West Point senior, to sign up for an extra three years in uniform.

"Education is extremely important to me, and I know I want a master's degree at the very least," Cadet Archuleta said. "The Army has a wonderful relationship with some of the top-tier graduate schools, especially in the Ivy League. I want to attend a school of that caliber."

In 2001, but before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, 9.3 percent of the Army's young officers left active duty at their first opportunity. By 2002, the number of those junior officers leaving at their first opportunity dropped to 7.1 percent, and in 2003, only 6.3 percent opted out. But the number grew to 8.3 percent in 2004 and 8.6 percent in 2005.

The statistics are even more striking among West Point graduates, who receive an Ivy League-quality education at taxpayer expense — and, in the view of many senior officers and West Point alumni, owe the nation and the Army a debt of loyalty beyond the initial five years of active duty.

The retention rate at the five-year mark for the West Point class of 1999 was 71.9 percent in 2004, down from 78.1 percent for the previous year's class. And for the class of 2000, the retention rate fell to 65.8 percent, meaning that last year the Army lost more than a third — 34. 2 percent — of that group of officers as they reached the end of their initial five-year commitment.

That is the highest rate of loss over the past 16 years among West Point officers reaching the five-year mark. For young officers receiving their commissions in 2006, the Army will guarantee slots in the most sought-after branches of the service — aviation, armor or intelligence, for example — in exchange for an extra three years in uniform.

Similarly, if a young officer wants an initial posting to a desired location or an opportunity to earn a master's degree, the Army will guarantee either choice in exchange for three more years of active duty.

The West Point graduating class of 2006 responded at levels even higher than anticipated by senior officers at the military academy, with 352 of the 875 seniors — 40.2 percent — signing on to the program as they approached the date in late May when they would be commissioned as second lieutenants.

"It is an amazing response," said Lt. Gen. William J. Lennox Jr., the West Point superintendent. "It has exceeded how I thought the class would respond."

Across the entire Army this spring, 3,420 newly commissioned junior officers are expected to enter active duty, according to the Army's personnel office. Of those, 1,124 — about one-third — have agreed to serve an extra three years in uniform under the new program.

According to Army statistics, 718 signed up to choose their career track, 289 contracted for the graduate school opportunity — 257 of them from West Point — and 117 wanted to pick the location where they, and their families, would be based.

The graduate school program was carefully structured to keep officers in uniform even beyond the extra three-year commitment.

After completing a master's degree program, an officer also has to repay the Army with three months of service for every month back in the classroom. This could push some officers beyond an automatic 8 years of service, toward 12 years — at which point, goes the thinking of the senior officers who devised the program, they may decide to stay in for a full 20.

"Today's officers make a career decision to come or go at the three- or four-year mark, while a decade ago they made it closer to the seven- or eight-year mark," said Lt. Gen. Franklin L. Hagenbeck, the Army's senior personnel officer.

"One of the salient issues in this information age is that if they are going to be competitive when they leave the Army — whether at the 4-year mark, the 10-year mark or after 20 — they have to maintain critical skills," General Hagenbeck said. "They want to have graduate schooling."

The cost of the program will depend on how many young officers enter graduate school in a given year, but Army personnel managers say that whatever the individual annual tuition fees, they are far less than the cost of training and preparing a new officer. The Army will cap individual tuition at $13,000 per year, although the service has already negotiated with a number of schools to waive the difference in fees.

At the five-year mark in their career, Army captains usually are in command of a company, a junior leadership position putting them at the center of the day-to-day fight. The Army needs even more company-level officers today, as it expands the number of its deployable brigade combat teams.

    Young Officers Leaving Army at a High Rate, NYT, 10.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/10/washington/10army.html?hp&ex=1144728000&en=7997627fd7acb6ee&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Lawyer: Rumsfeld "messed up" Guantanamo trials

Fri Apr 7, 2006 2:31 PM ET
Reuters
By Jane Sutton

GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his appointees set rules that violate President George W. Bush's order to hold fair trials for prisoners charged with terrorism in the Guantanamo tribunals, a military defense lawyer said on Friday.

"We can't help it that the secretary of defense and his delegees (sic) have messed this thing up, but they have," military lawyer Army Maj. Tom Fleener told the presiding officer at one of the hearings.

"If the rules don't provide for a full and fair trial, then they violate the president's order."

Fleener was trying to persuade the presiding officer, Col. Peter Brownback, to let a Yemeni defendant act as his own attorney on charges of conspiring to attack civilians and destroy property.

Tribunal rules set by the Pentagon require the defendants to have U.S. military lawyers who are authorized to see secret evidence that the accused may not be allowed to view. Pentagon officials have refused defense requests to allow self-representation, which Fleener called a fundamental right in nearly every court on Earth.

Fleener was appointed to defend Ali Hamza al Bahlul, an acknowledged al Qaeda member charged with conspiring to commit terrorism by acting as Osama bin Laden's bodyguard and making al Qaeda recruiting videos.

Bahlul has refused to cooperate with any lawyer appointed by the U.S. military. He asked to act as his own attorney or to have a Yemeni lawyer, and declared a boycott when the request was denied during a March hearing. He did not attend his hearing on Friday at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Fleener said Bahlul cannot get a fair trial unless the rules change. "As the world looks at this system, it's going to have no legitimacy whatsoever," he said.

Bush created them to try foreign terrorist suspects after the September 11 attacks, and directed Rumsfeld and his appointees to draft rules that ensure full and fair trials while protecting national security.

RULES QUESTIONED

Defense lawyers have questioned whether another rule violated Bush's order by changing the role of the presiding officer. The president's order said tribunal members would all serve as triers of law and fact, giving each of the four to seven panel members a dual role as judge and juror.

Subsequent Pentagon rules gave only the presiding officer the authority to decide legal issues, making him essentially the judge. The presiding officers have conducted three rounds of pretrial hearings at Guantanamo since January without the other tribunal members present. Defense lawyers questioned whether that constituted a proper hearing.

The Guantanamo tribunals are the first war crimes trials held by the U.S. military since World War Two.

Military defense lawyers and human rights groups have called the tribunals fundamentally unfair and stacked to ensure convictions. The U.S. Supreme Court heard a challenge to their legitimacy last month and is expected to rule by the end of June on whether the trials can proceed.

Ten of the 490 Guantanamo detainees have been charged with conspiring to commit terrorism and four had pretrial hearings this week at the base. The defendants would face life in prison if convicted.

    Lawyer: Rumsfeld "messed up" Guantanamo trials, R, 7.4.2006, http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-04-07T183130Z_01_N056244_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-GUANTANAMO.xml

Pentagon says improper data in security database

Wed Apr 5, 2006 1:39 PM ET
Reuters
By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon said on Wednesday an internal review launched after revelations that it had collected data on U.S. peace activists found that some information stored in a database of possible terrorist threats should not have been kept there.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said that "less than 2 percent" of the more than 13,000 entries in the database provided through the so-called Talon reporting system "should not have been there or should have been removed at a certain point in time."

Whitman declined to state the nature of these entries or the people they involved, noting that the contents of the database were classified.

In disclosing results of the internal review, Whitman also said the Pentagon was putting in place new safeguards and oversight intended to prevent data from being improperly stored in the database.

The review was announced in December after revelations that the database, a repository of data on potential terrorist threats to Pentagon personnel or facilities, included information on American citizens including peace activists and others who did not represent a genuine security threat.

The Pentagon is legally restricted in the types of information it can gather about activities and individuals inside the United States.

Under the Talon system, Defense Department personnel, both civilian and military, are asked to report on activities they deem suspicious. These reports are placed in the Cornerstone database, handled by a Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA.

Some critics have pointed to similarities in the Pentagon's activities during the Iraq War and those of the Vietnam War period, when it spied on antiwar activists.

"If the Pentagon has been collecting information improperly on Americans, it should provide a full accounting of what kind of information it collected, on whom and why, subject only perhaps to protecting the privacy of individuals," said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, a civil liberties advocacy organization interested in government surveillance.

"It's only with that kind of full accounting that you can have any assurance that the practice has stopped and will be prevented," Martin added.

    Pentagon says improper data in security database, R, 5.4.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-04-05T173917Z_01_N05281195_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-USA-PENTAGON.xml

In reversal, US opts to release Guantanamo files

Mon Apr 3, 2006 7:11 PM ET
Reuters
By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - After four years of resisting disclosure of information on Guantanamo detainees, the Pentagon changed course on Monday and voluntarily released about 2,600 pages of documents relating to numerous prisoners.

The Pentagon generally has refused to release documents identifying the foreign terrorism suspects held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, citing security concerns such as keeping groups like al Qaeda in the dark about who is being imprisoned.

"It is an attempt to be transparent," Bryan Whitman, a senior Pentagon spokesman, said of the document release.

The Pentagon disclosed transcripts of military hearings from the second half of 2005 reviewing detainees' detention, and submissions made by their lawyers. This comes a month after it released 5,000 pages of documents under a judge's order in a freedom of information suit brought by a news organization.

Whitman told reporters they raised "interesting points, valid points" when asking if the Pentagon, by releasing the latest documents, was giving up its own previous national security concerns.

But he said that in light of losing its fight to withhold the other documents in the case filed by the Associated Press, the Pentagon "has determined that it's prudent to go ahead and release" documents not covered by the judge's previous order.

Whitman said there are 490 detainees at the Guantanamo prison, which opened in January 2002. Rights activists condemn indefinite detentions at Guantanamo and prisoners' lack of legal rights. Only 10 have been charged with a crime.

"There are still vast numbers of documents that are concealed and hidden and declared to be secret and confidential," said Bill Goodman, legal director for the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents numerous detainees.

Transcripts of some hearings released on Monday did not state the name of the detainees involved, although the names and nationalities of many detainees were contained in other documents and those released last month.

A Yemeni detainee said in a transcript, "I have nothing to tell, I am a normal person who works in agriculture. I have never killed anybody." He said he grew potatoes, tomatoes, onions and raisins.

Whitman said Guantanamo detainees "are terrorist trainers, they're bomb-makers, they're people that worked directly for Osama bin Laden, they're would-be suicide bombers. And we know that they're trained to lie to try to gain sympathy for their condition and to bring pressure upon the U.S. government."

Lawyers for Algerian Saber Lahmar, seized in Bosnia in 2002 before ending up at Guantanamo, wrote, "Unlike many other detainees who have been deemed 'enemy combatants,' Mr. Lahmar was not apprehended on the battlefield, and in fact there is no evidentiary support whatsoever to suggest that he has ever taken up arms against the United States or its allies."

The lawyers told the military panel considering his case that "justice and human decency require his release forthwith," noting he has a young daughter who he has never seen because she was born after he was seized.

Another transcript showed military officers questioning a detainee named Sabri Mohammed Ebrahim about possessing a brand of wristwatch that they said was linked to al Qaeda bombings.

"All I know about the watch is that it is a Casio ... I know it has a compass. When we pray we have to face Mecca," he said.

    In reversal, US opts to release Guantanamo files, R, 3.4.2006, http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-04-03T231107Z_01_N03304246_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-GUANTANAMO-DOCUMENTS.xml

Pentagon meets on Lockheed F-35 production

Fri Mar 31, 2006 1:08 PM ET
Reuters
By Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Pentagon officials met Friday to weigh a timeline for initial production of the $250 billion-plus Lockheed Martin Corp. F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the costliest international warplane project, before it has even flown.

After the session chaired by Kenneth Krieg, the Defense Department's chief weapons buyer, Pentagon spokeswoman Cheryl Irwin said a decision on the timetable was still "pending."

The aircraft's leading subcontractors include Northrop Grumman Corp., BAE Systems Plc and United Technologies Corp.'s Pratt & Whitney unit.

The United States is developing the F-35 along with Britain and seven other international partners at an estimated cost of $256 billion for the development effort and the 2,593 jets that the United States and Britain plan to buy.

Britain has committed $2 billion to developing the fighter, more than twice the money put in by the other partners -- Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, Canada, Australia, Denmark and Norway.

The Government Accountability Office, Congress's investigative arm, urged the Pentagon this week to delay F-35 production until it has a better grip on costs and major systems' technology maturity.

At issue in the meeting Friday was the release of funds so that Lockheed may start buying raw materials and tooling to produce the first five aircraft for the U.S. Air Force.

Lockheed is hoping for quick approval of this "low-rate" initial production to start making the aircraft next year for a first delivery in 2009.

The radar-evading F-35, being built in three variants, is scheduled to fly for the first time in October.

The next step is publication by the Pentagon of a decision paper based on the findings of the Defense Acquisition Board meeting, the high-level panel chaired Friday by Krieg.

Such papers sometimes take as long as a month or more before the gist of them is made known by the Pentagon.

    Pentagon meets on Lockheed F-35 production, R, 31.3.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-03-31T180800Z_01_WAT005203_RTRUKOC_0_US-ARMS-USA-FIGHTER.xml

Caspar Weinberger, Cabinet officer for two presidents, dies

Posted 3/28/2006 12:00 PM Updated 3/28/2006 8:08 PM
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — Caspar Weinberger, who oversaw the Pentagon's biggest peacetime spending increase as President Reagan's defense secretary and later was indicted for his role in the Iran-Contra affair, died Tuesday. He was 88. (Related video: Weinberger also served Nixon)

Weinberger had been hospitalized in Bangor, Maine, with a high fever and pneumonia brought on by his age, according to his son, Caspar Weinberger Jr.

President Bush called him "an American statesman and a dedicated public servant" who strengthened the military and helped end the Cold War. "This good man made many contributions to our nation," the president said in a statement.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "He left the U.S. armed forces stronger, our country safer and the world more free."

Weinberger served as President Nixon's budget director and was given the nickname "Cap the Knife" for his efforts to slash government spending. Yet Weinberger's best-known role may have been as Reagan's defense secretary, when the classic cold warrior presided over a cumulative $2 trillion in military spending.

Determined to ensure U.S. strategic strength to counter the Soviet Union, Weinberger pushed Congress to fund such programs as the Strategic Defense Initiative, Midgetman and MX missiles, B-1B bombers and stealth aircraft.

But it was also during this time that reports surfaced of excesses at the Pentagon, from $600 toilet seats to $400 hammers. Cartoonists had a field day portraying Weinberger with toilet seats around his neck.

In a Feb. 10, 1986, interview with The Washington Post, Reagan defended his defense secretary. "That's the same price that TWA and Delta and United pay. It is a molded cover for the entire toilet system. And, yes, it does cost about that much."

Supporters contended the defense buildup helped cause the collapse of the Soviet Union.

"His legacy is a strong and free America, and for this and for a lifetime of selfless service, a grateful nation thanks him," former first lady Nancy Reagan said Tuesday.

A lifelong Republican, Weinberger's early interest in politics and government — sparked by his father, a lawyer — led him to the Pentagon and White House.

But his work also led to a trouble — federal felony charges stemming from his alleged role in the sale of weapons to Iran to finance secret, illegal aid to the Nicaraguan Contras.

The "arms-for-hostages" affair poisoned the closing years of Reagan's administration and permanently stained the reputations of the insiders involved.

In one of the first President Bush's final official acts after his 1992 loss to Bill Clinton, he granted Christmas Eve pardons to Weinberger and five others accused in the affair. Bush was Reagan's vice president.

Weinberger, 75 at the time, had been scheduled to stand trial in less than two weeks on charges that he concealed thousands of pages of his handwritten notes from congressional investigators and prosecutors.

He'd earlier rejected independent counsel Lawrence Walsh's plea-bargain offer to testify against his longtime friends and colleagues — including Reagan — and plead guilty to a misdemeanor.

Weinberger had said he was innocent of all the charges and considered the indictment a political attack.

After the pardon was announced, Walsh alleged that "the Iran-Contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed."

Weinberger's son said Tuesday, "My father was just a world diplomat, a No. 1 great American patriot. He always stayed the course. He always had beliefs, he held to those beliefs."

In 1989, Weinberger, a self-described "frustrated newspaperman" — he was president of the Harvard Crimson — joined Forbes to become the magazine's fourth publisher. In 1993 he was named chairman of Forbes Inc.

Weinberger occasionally spoke out on current affairs in recent years. In 1996, he criticized then-Defense Secretary William J. Perry for refusing to announce publicly that the U.S. would defend Taiwan if China fired missiles at the island.

He told a Nebraska group in 1999 that despite victories in the Cold War and Gulf War, the United States still faced threats

"Peace alone is not enough. Peace can even mean slavery sometimes. Peace and freedom is what we have to have," Weinberger said.

In 1983, he argued that a force of U.S. Marines stationed at Beirut's airport was too small and lightly armed, calling them a "disaster waiting to happen." On Oct. 22, 1983, 241 Marines and sailors were killed in attacks on the barracks.

In an interview with PBS' Frontline in late September 2001, Weinberger said, "The fact that I had been warning against this very thing didn't give me any slight satisfaction, I can assure of that. It was terrible to be proven right under such horrible circumstances."

Born Aug. 18, 1917, in San Francisco, Weinberger attended Harvard, graduating in 1938 and getting his law degree from Harvard in 1941. He served in the infantry in the Pacific in World War II.

He began his political career in 1952 in the California Legislature, where he took on and cleaned up a corrupt state liquor commission.

Weinberger, who called himself a "fiscal Puritan" and believed budgets should always be balanced, first demonstrated his budget-trimming talents in the late 1960s when he helped solve California's budget problems as then-Gov. Reagan's finance director.

His tireless pursuit of Reagan's fiscal policies drew the attention of the Nixon White House and in 1969 he was recruited to head the Federal Trade Commission, where as chairman he instituted several high-profile reforms. He moved on to run the president's Office of Management and Budget in 1970.

Weinberger also served as Nixon's secretary of health, education and welfare before returning to San Francisco in 1975 as special counsel to the Bechtel Corp., the huge worldwide construction company.

His death came a day after the passing of another Reagan administration official, press secretary and political adviser Franklyn "Lyn" Nofziger.

Besides his son, Weinberger is survived by a daughter, Arlin Weinberger, and his wife of 63 years, Jane. All three were at his bedside when he died.

A statement from Weinberger's family said funeral arrangements at Arlington National Cemetery are pending.

    Caspar Weinberger, Cabinet officer for two presidents, dies, NYT, 28.3.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-03-28-weinberger_x.htm

Pentagon mulls torture rule on Guantanamo evidence

Wed Mar 22, 2006 7:14 PM ET
Reuters
By David Morgan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In what would be a key change in U.S. policy, the Pentagon may formally require military prosecutors to observe a U.N. convention against torture in their use of evidence during tribunals at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

Such a move would represent a formal bar on the use of any evidence obtained by torture in prisoner tribunals at the U.S. naval base in Cuba, where the United States has held hundreds of foreign terrorism suspects since early 2002.

Washington has faced steady criticism over the Guantanamo camp from the United Nations, rights groups and some foreign governments. Former detainees have charged U.S. authorities use torture at the camp, which the Pentagon denies.

Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said on Wednesday the administration up to now has relied on prosecutors to ensure that their cases before tribunals, known as military commissions, reflect President George W. Bush's stated policy that the United States not condone torture.

"Up to this point, it's not believed to have been necessary because of the way in which prosecutors and the commission members have been able to proceed in their trials," Whitman told reporters.

"But it is something that is being looked at as a possible way to eliminate any doubt that the Convention Against Torture, Article 15, is understood and is applicable to these prosecutions," he said. "The department is taking a look at it and may issue a separate instruction on it."

Article 15 of the U.N Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment requires states to ensure that evidence invoked in proceedings not be the result of torture.

But Air Force Maj. Jane Boomer, a Pentagon spokeswoman, told reporters at Guantanamo earlier this month that current tribunal rules hypothetically could allow the use of evidence obtained through torture because such evidence was not explicitly banned.

"It is not specified in the rulebook, period," she said at a March 2 news conference at the camp.

However, she said such evidence could not be admitted if it would deny the accused a fair trial.

Bush authorized the military tribunals after the September 11 attacks, but the system has come under fire from human rights activists and some military lawyers as fundamentally unfair to defendants.

U.S. officials have vigorously and repeatedly denied any claim that they engage in torture.

But word of the possible policy change, which some officials expect soon, comes a month after five United Nations special envoys called for closing the Guantanamo prison in a report that accused the United States of violating bans on torture, arbitrary detention and the right to fair trial.

Most of the roughly 500 inmates at Guantanamo have been held for four years without trial.

Ten Guantanamo prisoners have been charged with war crimes and six have undergone pretrial hearings. But no case has yet reached the trial stage before a military commission.

Guantanamo inmates have challenged their detention in more than 180 cases filed in federal district court.

Next Tuesday, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in an important legal challenge to the tribunal system by Guantanamo prisoner Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the first inmate to face a military tribunal.

Hamdan, a Yemeni accused of being Osama bin Laden's bodyguard and driver, is challenging Bush's authority to use military tribunals to try Guantanamo prisoners for war crimes.

(Additional reporting by Jane Sutton in Miami)

    Pentagon mulls torture rule on Guantanamo evidence, R, 23.3.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2006-03-23T001358Z_01_N22374920_RTRUKOC_0_US-SECURITY-GUANTANAMO.xml

Advocates Hope Supreme Court Ruling Can Renew Attention to 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'

March 13, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHN FILES

WASHINGTON, March 12 — Advocates for repealing the ban on military service by openly gay men and lesbians say they hope that their cause may be helped by the Supreme Court decision barring universities from keeping military recruiters off their campuses in protest of that ban.

The unanimous ruling last week upheld a law requiring colleges to allow military recruiters access to students that is equal to access given to other employers, or risk forfeiting some federal grants.

The ruling led several newspapers to write editorials calling for the government to change its policy, including USA Today, which said the ban was "archaic and hurtful," and The Washington Post, which said "a combination of bigotry and inertia keeps the gay ban in place."

"The silver lining in this decision is that it has focused attention on the underlying issue of the prejudicial 'don't ask, don't tell' policy," said Steve Ralls, a spokesman for the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which monitors discrimination against gay people in the military.

Mr. Ralls said he believed that the ruling was likely to help build momentum for a repeal of the ban, and that it would increase interest in the issue among young adults.

The "don't ask, don't tell" policy, which went into effect over a decade ago, is still being debated largely because of efforts by groups like the legal defense network and the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay political group. Both organizations have filed lawsuits in federal court seeking to overturn the policy.

The military's ban on openly gay service members was a compromise to permit gay men and lesbians to serve without fear of harassment or expulsion as long as they kept their sexual orientation to themselves.

Patrick Guerriero, executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, said his group had found "new traction" recently among lawmakers who say they are concerned that the military's policy of discharging personnel who are discovered to be gay further hampers a military already strained by overseas deployments.

Mr. Guerriero said the group had also begun to reach a new generation of gay conservatives and veterans who oppose the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. He said the group's supporters had sent more than 10,000 letters in the past year to members of Congress asking for an end to the ban.

"Ultimately," Mr. Guerriero said, "we think it's going to take a Republican with strong military credentials to make a shift in the policy."

Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, an independent public policy group in Livonia, Mich., called the groups' efforts "a big P.R. campaign."

"The law is there to protect good order and discipline in the military," Ms. Donnelly said, "and it's not going to change."

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said that the Bush administration would not revisit the ban. The Defense Department, when asked about the policy on Friday, issued a statement saying that the policy "implements a federal law," adding, "The law would need to be changed to affect the department's policy."

Mr. Ralls said veterans had "enormous influence on Capitol Hill," and his group has encouraged them to talk about the issue. Those who have include Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the former NATO supreme commander and Democratic presidential candidate, and several retired gay officers who have traveled to Washington to discuss their experiences.

Mr. Ralls's group and the Log Cabin Republicans, along with Representative Martin T. Meehan, Democrat of Massachusetts, have organized a speaking tour of gay former service members that has stopped at 18 colleges and universities this year.

Mr. Meehan introduced a bill last year to repeal the policy on gay service members in an effort to enhance military readiness. It has 109 co-sponsors, including 4 Republicans.

"The fight to repeal the 'don't ask, don't tell' policy has been a 12-year marathon," he said, "with many uphill climbs and roadblocks along the way. The finish line isn't in sight yet, but we've moved a lot closer."

    Advocates Hope Supreme Court Ruling Can Renew Attention to 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell', NYT, 13.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/13/politics/13gays.html

8,000 desert during Iraq war

Posted 3/7/2006 12:00 AM Updated 3/6/2006 11:19 PM
USA TODAY
By Bill Nichols

WASHINGTON — At least 8,000 members of the all-volunteer U.S. military have deserted since the Iraq war began, Pentagon records show, although the overall desertion rate has plunged since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.

Since fall 2003, 4,387 Army soldiers, 3,454 Navy sailors and 82 Air Force personnel have deserted. The Marine Corps does not track the number of desertions each year but listed 1,455 Marines in desertion status last September, the end of fiscal 2005, says Capt. Jay Delarosa, a Marine Corps spokesman.

Desertion records are kept by fiscal year, so there are no figures from the beginning of the war in March 2003 until that fall.

Some lawyers who represent deserters say the war in Iraq is driving more soldiers to question their service and that the Pentagon is cracking down on deserters.

"The last thing they want is for people to think ... that this is like Vietnam," says Tod Ensign, head of Citizen Soldier, an anti-war group that offers legal aid to deserters. (Related story: Marines hunt Vietnam-era deserters)

Desertion numbers have dropped since 9/11. The Army, Navy and Air Force reported 7,978 desertions in 2001, compared with 3,456 in 2005. The Marine Corps showed 1,603 Marines in desertion status in 2001. That had declined by 148 in 2005.

The desertion rate was much higher during the Vietnam era. The Army saw a high of 33,094 deserters in 1971 — 3.4% of the Army force. But there was a draft and the active-duty force was 2.7 million.

Desertions in 2005 represent 0.24% of the 1.4 million U.S. forces.

Opposition to the war prompts a small fraction of desertions, says Army spokeswoman Maj. Elizabeth Robbins. "People always desert, and most do it because they don't adapt well to the military," she says. The vast majority of desertions happen inside the USA, Robbins says. There is only one known case of desertion in Iraq.

Most deserters return within months, without coercion. Commander Randy Lescault, spokesman for the Naval Personnel Command, says that between 2001 and 2005, 58% of Navy deserters walked back in. Of the rest, the most are apprehended during traffic stops. Penalties range from other-than-honorable discharges to death for desertion during wartime. Few are court-martialed.

    8,000 desert during Iraq war, UT, 7.3.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-03-07-deserters_x.htm

U.S. Reveals Identities of Detainees

March 4, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

GUANTÁNAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba, March 3 (AP) — After four years of secrecy, the Pentagon released documents on Friday that have the names of detainees at the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay.

The Bush administration had hidden the identities, home countries and other information about the men, who were accused of having links to the Taliban or Al Qaeda. But a federal judge rejected administration arguments that releasing the names would violate the detainees' privacy and could endanger them and their families. The release resulted from a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by The Associated Press.

The names were scattered throughout more than 5,000 pages of transcripts of hearings at Guantánamo Bay, but no complete list was given, and it was not immediately clear how many names the documents contained. In most of the transcripts, the person speaking is identified only as "detainee." Names appear only when court officials or detainees refer to people by name.

The documents also have the names of former prisoners, including Moazzam Begg and Feroz Ali Abbasi, both British citizens.

The men were mostly captured in the 2001 American-led war that drove the Taliban from power in Afghanistan and sent Osama bin Laden deeper into hiding.

Most of the Guantánamo Bay hearings were held to determine if the detainees were "enemy combatants." That classification, Bush administration lawyers say, deprives the detainees of Geneva Convention prisoner-of-war protections and allows them to be held indefinitely without charges.

Documents released last year, also because of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by The A.P., had the detainees' names and nationalities blacked out.

An American military spokesman in Guantánamo Bay said the Pentagon was uneasy about handing over the transcripts.

"Personal information on detainees was withheld solely to protect detainee privacy and for their own security," Lt. Cmdr. Chito Peppler said.

He said the Department of Defense was concerned that disclosure "could result in retribution or harm to the detainees or their families."

    U.S. Reveals Identities of Detainees, NYT, 4.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/04/politics/04gitmo.html?hp&ex=1141534800&en=a80ba9b3f3bd15c9&ei=5094&partner=homepage


 

Army to Pay Halliburton Unit Most Costs Disputed by Audit

February 27, 2006
The New York Times
By JAMES GLANZ

The Army has decided to reimburse a Halliburton subsidiary for nearly all of its disputed costs on a $2.41 billion no-bid contract to deliver fuel and repair oil equipment in Iraq, even though the Pentagon's own auditors had identified more than $250 million in charges as potentially excessive or unjustified.

The Army said in response to questions on Friday that questionable business practices by the subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, had in some cases driven up the company's costs. But in the haste and peril of war, it had largely done as well as could be expected, the Army said, and aside from a few penalties, the government was compelled to reimburse the company for its costs.

Under the type of contract awarded to the company, "the contractor is not required to perform perfectly to be entitled to reimbursement," said Rhonda James, a spokeswoman for the southwestern division of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, based in Dallas, where the contract is administered.

The contract has been the subject of intense scrutiny after disclosures in 2003 that it had been awarded without competitive bidding. That produced criticism from Congressional Democrats and others that the company had benefited from its connection with Dick Cheney, who was Halliburton's chief executive before becoming vice president.

Later that year auditors began focusing on the fuel deliveries under the contract, finding that the fuel transportation costs that the company was charging the Army were in some cases nearly triple what others were charging to do the same job. But Kellogg Brown & Root, which has consistently maintained that its costs were justified, characterized the Army's decision as an official repudiation of those criticisms.

"Once all the facts were fully examined, it is clear, and now confirmed, that KBR performed this work appropriately per the client's direction and within the contract terms," said Cathy Mann, a company spokeswoman, in a written statement on the decision. The company's charges, she said, "were deemed properly incurred."

The Pentagon's Defense Contract Audit Agency had questioned $263 million in costs for fuel deliveries, pipeline repairs and other tasks that auditors said were potentially inflated or unsupported by documentation. But the Army decided to pay all but $10.1 million of those contested costs, which were mostly for trucking fuel from Kuwait and Turkey.

That means the Army is withholding payment on just 3.8 percent of the charges questioned by the Pentagon audit agency, which is far below the rate at which the agency's recommendation is usually followed or sustained by the military — the so-called "sustention rate."

Figures provided by the Pentagon audit agency on thousands of military contracts over the past three years show how far the Halliburton decision lies outside the norm.

In 2003, the agency's figures show, the military withheld an average of 66.4 percent of what the auditors had recommended, while in 2004 the figure was 75.2 percent and in 2005 it was 56.4 percent.

Rick Barton, co-director of the postconflict reconstruction project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said despite the difficulties of doing business in a war zone, the low rate of recovery on such huge and widely disputed charges was hard to understand. "To think that it's near zero is ridiculous when you're talking these kinds of numbers," he said.

The Halliburton contract is referred to as a "cost-plus" agreement, meaning that after the company recovers its costs, it also receives various markups and award fees. Although the markups and fees are difficult to calculate exactly using the Army figures, they appear to be about $100 million.

One of Halliburton's most persistent critics, Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat who is the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Government Reform, said in a written statement about the Army's decision, "Halliburton gouged the taxpayer, government auditors caught the company red-handed, yet the Pentagon ignored the auditors and paid Halliburton hundreds of millions of dollars and a huge bonus."

About $208 million of the disputed charges was mostly related to the cost of importing fuel, which was at the heart of the controversy surrounding the contract. Kellogg Brown & Root hired a little-known Kuwaiti company, Altanmia, to transport fuel in enormous truck convoys. The Pentagon auditors found that in part because of the transportation fees that Kellogg Brown & Root agreed to pay Altanmia, the cost for a gallon of gasoline was roughly 40 percent higher than what the American military paid when it did the job itself — under a separate contract it had negotiated with Altanmia.

The Army said in a written statement that it had largely accepted Kellogg Brown & Root's assertions that costs had been driven up by factors beyond its control — the exigencies of war and the hard-line negotiating stance of the state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corporation. The Army said the Kuwaiti fuel company blocked attempts by Kellogg Brown & Root to renegotiate its transportation contract with Altanmia. In the end, the Army decided to pay the Halliburton subsidiary all but $3.81 million of the $208 million in fuel-related costs questioned by auditors.

The Kellogg Brown & Root contract, called Restore Iraqi Oil, or RIO, will be paid with about $900 million of American taxpayer money and $1.5 billion of Iraqi oil proceeds and money seized from Saddam Hussein's government. Official criticism of the work became so intense that in November, an auditing board sponsored by the United Nations recommended that the United States repay some or all of the $208 million related to the alleged fuel overcharges — an allegation Halliburton says has never been justified.

In fact, Ms. Mann said, the Army's decision clearly showed that "any claims that the figures contained in these audit reports are 'overcharges' are uninformed and flat wrong." She said that the fuel charges themselves had been 100 percent reimbursed and that the reductions all came from adjustments on administrative costs associated with that mission.

Still, the Army conceded that some of the criticisms of the company's business practices were legitimate. As a result, the Army said, it would exclude about half of the auditors' questioned charges from the amount used to derive the markups and fees, which are calculated as a sliding percentage of the costs. That decision could cost the company a maximum of about $7 million.

Ms. James, the Corps of Engineers spokeswoman, said that in addition to the other modest penalties that Kellogg Brown & Root had been assessed by the Army's contracting officers, the sliding percentages on some of the fees had been lowered by unspecified amounts to reflect shortcomings in the company's dealings in Iraq. "All fees were awarded in accordance with the award fee plan set out in the contract, which placed more emphasis on timely mission accomplishment than on cost control and paperwork," Ms. James said.

Mr. Barton, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that with the relatively small penalties paid by the company for falling short in its performance in Iraq, it was hard to see what the Army's scrutiny of the company's practices had amounted to in the end.

"When they say, 'We questioned their business model or their business decisions' — well, yeah, so what?" Mr. Barton said. "You questioned it but there was no result."

In answer to written questions, a spokesman for the Defense Contract Audit Agency, Lt. Col. Brian Maka, said the settlement of the disputed charges was based on "broader business case considerations" beyond just Pentagon audits.

But when asked whether the Army's decision reflected on the quality of the audits, Colonel Maka said only that the agency "has no indication of problems with the audit process," and he referred questions on the settlement itself to the Army.

A former senior Defense Department manager knowledgeable about the audits and the related contracting issues said, "That's as close as D.C.A.A. can get to saying, 'We're not happy with it either.' "

Because of the size of the contract and the contention surrounding Halliburton's dealings with the government, the RIO audits were carried out by the agency's top personnel and were subjected to extraordinarily thorough reviews, the former manager said.

This is unlikely to be the last time the Army and Halliburton meet over negotiated costs. On a separate contract in Iraq, for logistics support to the United States military, more than $11 billion had been disbursed to Kellogg Brown & Root by mid-January, according to the Army Field Support Command, based in Rock Island, Ill. Pentagon auditors have begun scrutinizing that contract as well.

    Army to Pay Halliburton Unit Most Costs Disputed by Audit, NYT, 27.2.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/27/international/middleeast/27contract.html?hp&ex=1141016400&en=3b193d83e4592b21&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Senior Lawyer at Pentagon Broke Ranks on Detainees

February 20, 2006
The New York Times
By TIM GOLDEN

One of the Pentagon's top civilian lawyers repeatedly challenged the Bush administration's policy on the coercive interrogation of terror suspects, arguing that such practices violated the law, verged on torture and could ultimately expose senior officials to prosecution, a newly disclosed document shows.

The lawyer, Alberto J. Mora, a Republican appointee who retired last month after more than four years as general counsel of the Navy, was one of many dissenters inside the Pentagon. Senior uniformed lawyers in all the military services also objected sharply to the interrogation policy, according to internal documents declassified last year.

But Mr. Mora's campaign against what he viewed as an official policy of cruel treatment, detailed in a memorandum he wrote in July 2004 and recounted in an article in the Feb. 27 issue of The New Yorker magazine, made public yesterday, underscored again how contrary views were often brushed aside in administration debates on the subject.

"Even if one wanted to authorize the U.S. military to conduct coercive interrogations, as was the case in Guantánamo, how could one do so without profoundly altering its core values and character?" Mr. Mora asked the Pentagon's chief lawyer, William J. Haynes II, according to the memorandum.

A Pentagon spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Tracy O'Grady-Walsh, declined to comment late yesterday on specific accusations in Mr. Mora's memorandum. "Detainee operations and interrogation policies have been scrutinized under a microscope, from all different angles," she said. "It was found that it was not a Department of Defense policy to encourage or condone torture."

In interviews, current and former Defense Department officials said that part of what was striking about Mr. Mora's forceful role in the internal debates was how out of character it seemed: a loyal Republican, he was known as a supporter of President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the fight against terrorism.

"He's an extremely well-spoken, almost elegant guy," the former director of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, David L. Brandt, who first came to Mr. Mora with concerns about the interrogation methods, said in an interview last week. "He's not a door-kicker."

Mr. Mora is also known for generally avoiding public attention. Reached by telephone yesterday, he declined to comment further on his memorandum.

Mr. Mora prepared the 22-page memorandum for a Defense Department review of interrogation operations that was conducted by Vice Adm. Albert T. Church III, after the scandal involving treatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The document focused on Mr. Mora's successful opposition to the coercive techniques that Mr. Rumsfeld approved for interrogators at Guantánamo Bay on Dec. 2, 2002, and Mr. Mora's subsequent, failed effort to influence the legal discussions that led to new methods approved by Mr. Rumsfeld the following April.

Mr. Mora took up the issue after Mr. Brandt came to him on Dec. 17, 2002, to relay the concerns of Navy criminal agents at Guantánamo that some detainees there were being subjected to "physical abuse and degrading treatment" by interrogators.

Acting with the support of Gordon R. England, who was then secretary of the Navy and is now Mr. Rumsfeld's deputy, Mr. Mora took his concerns to Mr. Haynes, the Defense Department's general counsel.

"In my view, some of the authorized interrogation techniques could rise to the level of torture, although the intent surely had not been to do so," Mr. Mora wrote.

After trying to rally other senior officials to his position, Mr. Mora met again with Mr. Haynes on Jan. 10, 2003. He argued his case even more forcefully, raising the possibility that senior officials could be prosecuted for authorizing abusive conduct, and asking: "Had we jettisoned our human rights policies?"

Still, Mr. Mora wrote, it was only when he warned Mr. Haynes on Jan. 15 that he was planning to issue a formal memorandum on his opposition to the methods — delivering a draft to Mr. Haynes's office — that Mr. Rumsfeld suddenly retracted the techniques.

In a break from standard practice, former Pentagon lawyers said, the final draft of the report on interrogation techniques was not circulated to most of the lawyers, including Mr. Mora, who had contributed to it. Several of them said they learned that a final version had been issued only after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke.

    Senior Lawyer at Pentagon Broke Ranks on Detainees, NYT, 20.2.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/politics/20mora.html?hp&ex=1140411600&en=99ca1b431b4aa927&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Navy's F-14 fighter jet flies its final mission

Posted 2/16/2006 11:07 PM Updated 2/17/2006 1:20 AM
USA TODAY
By Steven Komarow

WASHINGTON — The F-14 Tomcat, the fighter jet that soared into the national imagination in the movie Top Gun, has flown into the danger zone for the last time.

An F-14 Tomcat launches from the USS Theodore Roosevelt on Nov. 30, 2005.
U.S. Navy/HO, AP

The Navy announced Thursday that the last F-14 combat mission was completed Feb. 8, when a pair of Tomcats landed aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt after one dropped a bomb in Iraq.

Capt. William Sizemore, who flew on that last mission, said the Tomcat will be missed.

"This is one of the best airplanes ever built, and it's sad to see it go away," Sizemore said in a Navy report from the ship. "It's just a beautiful airplane. And it just looks like the ultimate fighter."

Although still swift and deadly, the F-14 is a victim of changing times. For example:

• Sophisticated missiles have made its specialty, aerial dogfighting, obsolete. Opposing aircraft target each other from miles away, often before the pilots can see each other except on radar.

• Precision bombing is the new priority, and despite modification, the Tomcat can't carry the loads of the new F/A-18 Super Hornet.

• It's too expensive in the long run. The jet that flew its first combat missions in September 1974 requires 50 hours of maintenance, compared with five to 10 hours for the Super Hornet, for each hour of flight time.

The F-14 and its Navy pilots were at the heart of the 1986 movie Top Gun, in which Tom Cruise played Maverick, an impetuous pilot training at the Navy's elite flight school in Miramar, Calif.

Top Gun enhanced the reputation of an already legendary jet, said Adm. William Fallon, the U.S. Pacific commander and a former F-14 weapons officer.

"Potential opponents, at the mere thought there might be Tomcats around, would head off the other direction," he said.

Although the Navy is better served by the newer jets, the beautiful F-14 will be missed, Fallon said. "It was the last of the pure fighters."

    Navy's F-14 fighter jet flies its final mission, UT, 17.2.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-02-16-navy-tomcat_x.htm

Pentagon review

America's Long War

Last week US defence chiefs unveiled their plan for battling global Islamist extremism. They envisage a conflict fought in dozens of countries and for decades to come. Today we look in detail at this seismic shift in strategic thinking, and what it will mean for Britain

Wednesday February 15, 2006
Guardian
Simon Tisdall and Ewen MacAskill

The message from General Peter Pace, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, was apocalyptic. "We are at a critical time in the history of this great country and find ourselves challenged in ways we did not expect. We face a ruthless enemy intent on destroying our way of life and an uncertain future."

Gen Pace was endorsing the Pentagon's four-yearly strategy review, presented to Congress last week. The report sets out a plan for prosecuting what the the Pentagon describes in the preface as "The Long War", which replaces the "war on terror". The long war represents more than just a linguistic shift: it reflects the ongoing development of US strategic thinking since the September 11 attacks.

Looking beyond the Iraq and Afghan battlefields, US commanders envisage a war unlimited in time and space against global Islamist extremism. "The struggle ... may well be fought in dozens of other countries simultaneously and for many years to come," the report says. The emphasis switches from large-scale, conventional military operations, such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, towards a rapid deployment of highly mobile, often covert, counter-terrorist forces.

Among specific measures proposed are: an increase in special operations forces by 15%; an extra 3,700 personnel in psychological operations and civil affairs units - an increase of 33%; nearly double the number of unmanned aerial drones; the conversion of submarine-launched Trident nuclear missiles for use in conventional strikes; new close-to-shore, high-speed naval capabilities; special teams trained to detect and render safe nuclear weapons quickly anywhere in the world; and a new long-range bomber force.

The Pentagon does not pinpoint the countries it sees as future areas of operations but they will stretch beyond the Middle East to the Horn of Africa, north Africa, central and south-east Asia and the northern Caucasus.

The cold war dominated the world from 1946 to 1991: the long war could determine the shape of the world for decades to come. The plan rests heavily on a much higher level of cooperation and integration with Britain and other Nato allies, and the increased recruitment of regional governments through the use of economic, political, military and security means. It calls on allies to build their capacity "to share the risks and responsibilities of today's complex challenges".

The Pentagon must become adept at working with interior ministries as well as defence ministries, the report says. It describes this as "a substantial shift in emphasis that demands broader and more flexible legal authorities and cooperative mechanisms ... Bringing all the elements of US power to bear to win the long war requires overhauling traditional foreign assistance and export control activities and laws."

Unconventional approach

The report, whose consequences are still being assessed in European capitals, states: "This war requires the US military to adopt unconventional and indirect approaches." It adds: "We have been adjusting the US global force posture, making long overdue adjustments to US basing by moving away from a static defence in obsolete cold war garrisons, and placing emphasis on the ability to surge quickly to troublespots across the globe."

The strategy mirrors in some respects a recent readjustment in British strategic thinking but it is on a vastly greater scale, funded by an overall 2007 US defence spending request of more than $513bn.

As well as big expenditure projects, the report calls for: investments in signals and human intelligence gathering - spies on the ground; funding for the Nato intelligence fusion centre; increased space radar capability; the expansion of the global information grid (a protected information network); and an information-sharing strategy "to guide operations with federal, state, local and coalition partners". A push will also be made to improve forces' linguistic skills, with an emphasis on Arabic, Chinese and Farsi.

The US plan, developed by military and civilian staff at the Pentagon in concert with other branches of the US government, will raise concerns about exacerbating the "clash of civilisations" and about the respect accorded to international law and human rights. To wage the long war, the report urges Congress to grant the Pentagon and its agencies expanded permanent legal authority of the kind used in Iraq, which may give US commanders greatly extended powers.

"Long duration, complex operations involving the US military, other government agencies and international partners will be waged simultaneously in multiple countries round the world, relying on a combination of direct (visible) and indirect (clandestine) approaches," the report says. "Above all they will require persistent surveillance and vastly better intelligence to locate enemy capabilities and personnel. They will also require global mobility, rapid strike, sustained unconventional warfare, foreign internal defence, counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency capabilities. Maintaining a long-term, low-visibility presence in many areas of the world where US forces do not traditionally operate will be required."

The report exposes the sheer ambition of the US attempt to mastermind global security. "The US will work to ensure that all major and emerging powers are integrated as constructive actors and stakeholders into the international system. It will also seek to ensure that no foreign power can dictate the terms of regional or global security.

Building partnerships

"It will attempt to dissuade any military competitor from developing disruptive capabilities that could enable regional hegemony or hostile action against the US and friendly countries."

Briefing reporters in Washington, Ryan Henry, a Pentagon policy official, said: "When we refer to the long war, that is the war against terrorist extremists and the ideology that feeds it, and that is something that we do see going on for decades." He added that the strategy was aimed at responding to the "uncertainty and unpredictability" of this conflict. "We in the defence department feel fairly confident that our forces will be called on to be engaged somewhere in the world in the next decade where they're currently not engaged, but we have no idea whatsoever where that might be, when that might be or in what circumstances that they might be engaged.

"We realise that almost in all circumstances others will be able to do the job less expensively than we can because we tend to have a very cost-intensive force. But many times they'll be able to do it more effectively too because they'll understand the local language, the local customs, they'll be culturally adept and be able to get things accomplished that we can't do. So building a partnership capability is a critical lesson learned.

"The operational realm for that will not necessarily be Afghanistan and Iraq; rather, that there are large swaths of the world that that's involved in and we are engaged today. We are engaged in things in the Philippines, in the Horn of Africa. There are issues in the pan-Sahel region of north Africa.

"There's a number of different places where there are activities where terrorist elements are out there and that we need to counter them, we need to be able to attack and disrupt their networks."

Priorities

The report identifies four priority areas

· Defeating terrorist networks

· Defending the homeland in depth

· Shaping the choices of countries at strategic crossroads

· Preventing hostile states and non-state actors from acquiring or using weapons of mass destruction

Lawrence's legacy

The Pentagon planners who drew up the long war strategy had a host of experts to draw on for inspiration. But they credit only one in the report: Lawrence of Arabia.

The authors anticipate US forces being engaged in irregular warfare around the world. They advocate "an indirect approach", building and working with others, and seeking "to unbalance adversaries physically and psychologically, rather than attacking them where they are strongest or in the manner they expect to be attacked.

They write: "One historical example that illustrates both concepts comes from the Arab revolt in 1917 in a distant theatre of the first world war, when British Colonel TE Lawrence and a group of lightly armed Bedouin tribesmen seized the Ottoman port city of Aqaba by attacking from an undefended desert side, rather than confronting the garrison's coastal artillery by attacking from the sea."

    America's Long War, G, 15.2.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1710062,00.html

For a General, a Tough Mission: Building the Army

February 5, 2006
The New York Times
By DAMIEN CAVE

FORT KNOX, Ky., Feb. 1 — From his office in the command center here, where dozens of recruiters answer questions about military life via e-mail and chat rooms, Maj. Gen. Thomas P. Bostick is trying to retool the Army's strategy for fighting a war within a war: persuading young people and their families that the military is a good choice, even when combat duty is almost certain.

The general has plans to attract teenagers with video games, Web sites, cellphone text messages and helicopter simulators in the back of 18-wheelers. He wants to win over parents through commercials on the Food Network, visits to rodeos and Nascar races, and recruiters who have recently returned from Iraq and Afghanistan and can address concerns about war.

And if that fails, General Bostick also has cash: $40,000 in bonuses for some recruits who take dangerous jobs; $1,000 for soldiers who persuade friends to sign up.

"We have a responsibility to tell the Army story," General Bostick said. "Recruiting is in the limelight, so we have to work harder."

General Bostick described the Army's strategy in his first extensive interview since taking control of reserve and active-duty recruiting in October. A former assistant division commander in Iraq, he now manages roughly 8,000 military recruiters nationwide, hundreds of civilians at Fort Knox, an advertising budget of about $200 million, and a horde of marketing tools, including a fleet of 13 tractor-trailers retrofitted to show off the Army's latest technology.

But General Bostick, 49, an engineer with a master's degree from Stanford who is known for his calm demeanor, still faces a daunting challenge. Last May, the Army retrained its recruiters on ethics after several were found to have cut corners to enlist unqualified soldiers. And for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the Army, the Army Reserve and the National Guard all fell short of their recruiting goals. The active-duty Army missed its target of 80,000 recruits by about 8 percent, its biggest shortfall since 1979.

Since then, the results have been more mixed. The Army reached its monthly targets for October, November and December. But in at least one of those months, General Bostick said, more than 10 percent of the recruits had scores on the military's aptitude test that were near the bottom of the scale — more than double the annual 4 percent limit set by the Department of Defense.

The Army's monthly goals were smaller, too. Recruiters sent 2,697 fewer active-duty recruits to basic training from October to December than they did during that period in 2004. Its goals for summer have been increased to make up the difference.

David Segal, a military sociologist at the University of Maryland, said the Army was struggling to compete with colleges and with private-sector companies. Parents, too, are pushing their children away from a military career, fearing that they will be assigned to combat.

"Recruiters are having a tougher and tougher time," Professor Segal said. "The economy is growing, and there is more and more opposition being voiced by parents and at high schools."

General Bostick, who described his new job as "very tough," said he was optimistic about the Army's ability to find, recruit and enlist the 105,500 soldiers it needs this year for the Army and Reserve.

He said recruiters had already signed up half of the 10,450 active-duty soldiers the Army hoped to send to basic training in July, the month with the largest quota. Though at least 20 percent will drop out before boot camp, he said, it is a sign of "steady improvement" nationwide.

Most other branches of the military, including the Marines and the National Guard, have met or exceeded their recruiting targets.

General Bostick attributed the Army's progress primarily to 1,200 recruiters added last year. The Army accounts for 70 percent of the troops serving in Iraq, and about a third of its recruiters are now combat veterans, he said.

"There is valid concern by the parents and those that are being recruited about the war," he said in the hourlong interview. "So these veterans who are coming back and able to tell their story and talk about how well trained they were and how well led — their experience in Iraq is really helping the environment."

General Bostick said he planned to give recruiters better leads and guidance. All new recruiters, for example, now receive a nine-page document offering suggested responses to thorny questions, like "Is the Army all about killing?" (Answer: "The Army is not about killing anyone, it is about supporting the United States, and when necessary, defending it at home and abroad.")

Fort Knox is the hub of these efforts. In the brick buildings that have been the recruiting command's headquarters since the mid-1990's, hundreds of soldiers and civilians try to figure out ways to inspire people to volunteer.

GoArmy.com, the Army's recruiting Web site, went live in February 1996 and is run from the main building here. General Bostick said chat rooms had become one of the command's most promising tools.

Each month, about 20,000 people read or post messages in the forums, according to Army figures. Nearly 50 civilian contractors at Fort Knox respond to their queries.

They work as late as 2 a.m. in a lecture hall stocked with new computers and telephone headsets. On a recent afternoon, several answered online questions about what to take to boot camp and which jobs were eligible for bonuses. A recruiter speaking Arabic tried to persuade someone on the telephone to become an Army linguist.

General Bostick said that the online recruiters identified about 1,700 people last year who were thinking about enlisting. Of these, 405 signed up, a percentage he said was far better than what recruiters could do making cold calls.

To help draw people to the Web site, General Bostick said, the Army must raise awareness of what it has to offer, both among teenagers and the people who influence their lives. According to the Army's advertising and media division, about 20 percent of the media budget now pays for appeals to parents on Home & Garden Television and the Food Network and through other outlets. Appeals via text message could start soon, possibly with a new Army slogan.

General Bostick said the Army was also expanding its relationship with Nascar, the National Hot Rod Association and the Professional Bull Riders Association. According to the plan, recruiters will visit schools and malls a few days before an event, offering free tickets and the chance to meet famous drivers or bull riders.

And there are other toys meant to attract, including the customized vehicles. The Army used to rely on simulated rock walls to spur interest, said Lt. Col. Mark V. Lathem, commander of the battalion that manages the fleet. "Now it's more like an Army version of 'Pimp My Ride.' "

At the building where the vehicles are designed and loaded, a black Hummer H2 with an Army logo had a high-end audiovisual system and three flat-screen monitors. Two of them showed Army footage from Iraq, accompanied by the Toby Keith song "American Soldier," and the third displayed images from an Xbox video game. A few feet away, an empty truck trailer was about to be transformed into an exhibit of the 21st-century soldier, with displays on the latest in underwear and night-vision goggles.

On the road, Colonel Lathem said, were the "aviation van," with the chassis of a helicopter attached to a computerized simulator, and the new Special Forces vehicle, which includes a simulated parachute drop. The trailers, Colonel Lathem said, cost about $1 million each.

The payoff for all of this is one piece of paper —a "lead card." At a busy event, about 50,000 people fill them out, giving names, addresses and phone numbers to the Army, Colonel Lathem said.

Gary M. Bishop, chief of the advertising and media division, said the Army also mailed about 10 million to 15 million lead cards to teenagers each year, their addresses pulled from Selective Service registrations and private databases bought by the Defense Department.

The cards are usually funneled to local recruiters. But last year, the Army began centralized screening at Fort Knox, with 35 civilians poring through 135,000 lead cards from April to September. About 86,000 were discarded because of errors or phony names or because the sender was not qualified to serve.

Still, the process yielded 273 new recruits. And the Army plans to expand the program.

But some of the officers who helped build the Army's sophisticated recruiting system say its influence may be limited. Col. David Slotwinksi, a former chief of staff for Army recruiting who retired in 2004, said the numbers and the quality of recruits were cause for concern.

"You're in a protracted conflict, and the only way to succeed is to build inside the nation a willingness to fight and sustain the course," Colonel Slotwinksi said.

General Bostick acknowledged the problems. "We have a tough mission," he said.

But, he added, "This is our job, and we're going to do it the best we can."

    For a General, a Tough Mission: Building the Army, NYT, 5.2.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/national/05recruit.html

A Frequently Asked Questions Guide for Military Recruiters
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/politics/20060205questions.pdf
copié 4.2.2006

New Team Plans to Identify Nuclear Attackers

February 2, 2006
The New York Times
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

The Pentagon has formed a team of nuclear experts to analyze the fallout from a terrorist nuclear attack on American soil in an effort to identify the attackers, officials have said.

The team, which can draw on hundreds of federal experts, uses such tools as robots that gather radioactive debris and sensitive gear to detect the origins of a device, whether a true atomic weapon or a so-called dirty bomb, that uses ordinary explosives to spew radioactivity.

The objective is to determine quickly who exploded the device and where it came from, in part to clarify the options to strike back, the officials said. The government also hopes that terrorists will be less likely to use a nuclear device if they know that it can be traced.

Michael K. Evenson, associate director for operations at the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which directs the team, said the program began operating last year. In federal parlance, the team conducts domestic nuclear event attribution, informally post-event forensics.

"I'm very confident we can achieve what we set out to do," Mr. Evenson said in an interview. "We've started, and intend to continue, an exercise and evaluation program so this doesn't fall into atrophy."

Today, Mr. Evenson is to speak about the detective work at a conference in Arlington, Va., sponsored by the Institute for Defense and Government Advancement, a company that runs military meetings. Officials said the talk would be the first time a federal official has publicly spoken about the program.

News reports have described scientific research conducted by the Pentagon and other federal agencies on discovering the origins of nuclear materials and devices. But the fact that the government is able to field organized teams to respond to an attack has not been reported.

Mr. Evenson said a secret presidential directive, "National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction," signed in September 2002, called for forming the team and its supporting network, which includes the Defense Department and other agencies.

The goal, he said, was "to figure out who attacked us" by analyzing the origins of nuclear materials and the origins and design of the devices.

Many experts say the risk of a terrorist nuclear attack is low but no longer unthinkable, given the spread of atomic materials and know-how.

A senior military official, who insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to disclose details of the program, said the threat reduction agency successfully conducted an exercise in October involving hundreds of people from many agencies. The participants, he said, included field workers gathering radioactive samples, nuclear analysts in laboratories working on the data and intelligence experts.

"It was a blind test," the official said. "None of the participants knew what they were analyzing."

The White House was briefed on the success in identifying the origins of the material, he added.

The official said that the site from which the team would send personnel and robots to gather radioactive samples was classified.

A document on the atomic sleuthing effort obtained by The New York Times said that the team had achieved an "initial integrated operational attribution capability for accurate and rapid attribution."

The document also said that the threat reduction agency had developed and exercised "robot technologies to collect debris samples in high radiation fields."

In the cold war, learning a nuclear attacker's identity was seen as simply a matter of tracking a missile from its blastoff point. But the threat of domestic terrorism using unconventional arms has changed that, adding the potential for anonymity.

Part of the new effort deals with reviving a science lost after the cold war — radioactive fallout analysis. Faint clues, often invisible to the eye, can, under intense scientific scrutiny, help identify an exploded bomb's type and characteristics,

Federal experts say that positively identifying the origin may require matching signatures from the debris with libraries of classified data about nuclear arms from around the world, including old fallout records and more direct intelligence about bomb types, characteristics and construction materials.

This detective work has many potential complexities, including the fact that knowing who made a bomb may say little about who detonated it. In Tom Clancy's "Sum of All Fears" (1991), Islamic terrorists find, rebuild and detonate an Israeli nuclear weapon.

Federal experts say that with the complex variety of possible threats — for instance, an American warhead being stolen and detonated in an American city — many types of intelligence may be needed. Although the threat reduction agency leads the effort, the program draws on experts at other agencies like the Homeland Security Department, the Justice Department, the Energy Department and eight national laboratories, officials said.

If an attack occurred overseas, the field elements of a team could rush there to gather radioactive and other samples for analysis at home, the senior military official said.

"That's clearly what it's designed to do," he said of the team.

Experts agree that such detective work can prove difficult. For years, the International Atomic Energy Agency has struggled with limited success to identify the source of highly enriched uranium, a potential bomb fuel, found by the agency's inspectors on Iranian nuclear gear.

Military officials said that the identification program was making great strides in detection and that they expected new advances.

"Our capabilities are much improved," the senior military official said. "We've trained a new generation, and they'll push the science and the operations into the future."

    New Team Plans to Identify Nuclear Attackers, NYT, 2.2.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/02/politics/02nuke.html

Army forces 50,000 soldiers into extended duty

Sun Jan 29, 2006 10:55 AM ET
Reuters
By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Army has forced about 50,000 soldiers to continue serving after their voluntary stints ended under a policy called "stop-loss," but while some dispute its fairness, court challenges have fallen flat.

The policy applies to soldiers in units due to deploy for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The Army said stop-loss is vital to maintain units that are cohesive and ready to fight. But some experts said it shows how badly the Army is stretched and could further complicate efforts to attract new recruits.

"As the war in Iraq drags on, the Army is accumulating a collection of problems that cumulatively could call into question the viability of an all-volunteer force," said defense analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute think tank.

"When a service has to repeatedly resort to compelling the retention of people who want to leave, you're edging away from the whole notion of volunteerism."

When soldiers enlist, they sign a contract to serve for a certain number of years, and know precisely when their service obligation ends so they can return to civilian life. But stop-loss allows the Army, mindful of having fully manned units, to keep soldiers on the verge of leaving the military.

Under the policy, soldiers who normally would leave when their commitments expire must remain in the Army, starting 90 days before their unit is scheduled to depart, through the end of their deployment and up to another 90 days after returning to their home base.

With yearlong tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, some soldiers can be forced to stay in the Army an extra 18 months.

HARDSHIP FOR SOME SOLDIERS

Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, an Army spokesman, said that "there is no plan to discontinue stop-loss."

"We understand that this is causing hardship for some individual soldiers, and we take individual situations into consideration," Hilferty said.

Hilferty said there are about 12,500 soldiers in the regular Army, as well as the part-time National Guard and Reserve, currently serving involuntarily under the policy, and that about 50,000 have had their service extended since the program began in 2002. An initial limited use of stop-loss was expanded in subsequent years to affect many more.

"While the policies relative to the stop-loss seem harsh, in terms of suspending scheduled separation dates (for leaving the Army), they are not absolute," Hilferty said. "And we take individual situations into consideration for compelling and compassionate reasons."

Hilferty noted the Army has given "exceptions" to 210 enlisted soldiers "due to personal hardship reasons" since October 2004, allowing them to leave as scheduled.

"The nation is at war and we are stop-lossing units deploying to a combat theater to ensure they mobilize, train, deploy, fight, redeploy and demobilize as a team," he said.

NO LUCK IN COURT

A few soldiers have gone to court to challenge stop-loss.

One such case fizzled last week, when U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington dismissed a suit filed in 2004 by two Army National Guard soldiers. The suit claimed the Army fraudulently induced soldiers to enlist without specifying that their service might be involuntarily extended.

Courts also have backed the policy's legality in Oregon and California cases.

Jules Lobel, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who represented the National Guard soldiers, said a successful challenge to stop-loss was still possible.

"I think the whole stop-loss program is a misrepresentation to people of how long they're going to actually serve. I think it's caused tremendous morale problems, tremendous psychological damage to people," Lobel said.

"When you sign up for the military, you're saying, 'I'll give you, say, six years and then after six years I get my life back.' And they're saying, 'No, really, we can extend you indefinitely.'"

Congressional critics have assailed stop-loss, and 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry called it "a back-door draft." The United States abolished the draft in 1973, but the all-volunteer military never before has been tested by a protracted war.

A report commissioned by the Pentagon called stop-loss a "short-term fix" enabling the Army to meet ongoing troop deployment requirements, but said such policies "risk breaking the force as recruitment and retention problems mount." It was written by Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army officer.

Thompson added, "The persistent use of stop-loss underscores the fact that the war-fighting burden is being carried by a handful of soldiers while the vast majority of citizens incur no sacrifice at all."

    Army forces 50,000 soldiers into extended duty, R, 29.1.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2006-01-29T155514Z_01_N196487_RTRUKOC_0_US-IRAQ-USA-STOPLOSS.xml

File shows US 'psychological operations' concerns

Thu Jan 26, 2006 7:02 PM ET
Reuters
By Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged in a document made public on Thursday that information spread by the Pentagon to influence foreign peoples and enemies increasingly seeps back home and is "consumed by our domestic audience."

The Pentagon argued the "psychological operations" information was truthful. But the research organization that obtained the document through the Freedom of Information Act described it as propaganda planted overseas that inevitably made its way back to the United States.

The document's disclosure comes amid a fierce debate over what is permissible for the U.S. government in getting its message across to foreign audiences. For example, the U.S. military command in Iraq is investigating a military program that funneled money to some Iraqi newspapers to publish pro-American articles.

The document, marked "secret," was titled "Information Operations Roadmap," and laid out the need for the Pentagon to improve its capabilities in psychological operations, electronic warfare, military deception and other areas.

"Secretary Rumsfeld's road map says the American people can't be protected from the Pentagon's psychological operations abroad but it doesn't matter as long as he's not targeting the American public. It's the collateral damage theory of propaganda," said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington.

The document stated that "information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and PSYOP (psychological operations), increasingly is consumed by our domestic audience and vice-versa."

Chief Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said he rejected the notion the Pentagon was comfortable with the notion of propaganda "bleeding back" from overseas to the United States. "We're not OK with it," Di Rita said.

"First of all, we're not lying. We're talking about truthful, accurate information, so that's baloney," Di Rita said.

The document noted that psychological operations were restricted by both Pentagon policy and presidential executive order from targeting American audiences and news organizations, as well as U.S. military personnel.

"The increasing ability of people in most parts of the globe to access international information sources makes targeting particular audiences more difficult. Today the distinction between foreign and domestic audiences becomes more a question of USG (U.S. government) intent rather than information dissemination practices," the document stated.

Information used in psychological operations "will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it stated.

"The likelihood that PSYOP messages will be replayed to a much broader audience, including the American public, requires specific boundaries be established," the document stated.

Pentagon officials said the document remained in effect but that some matters it covered were being re-evaluated.

    File shows US 'psychological operations' concerns, R, 26.1.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-01-27T000150Z_01_N26364579_RTRUKOC_0_US-ARMS-USA-INFORMATION.xml

Pentagon plan seeks increase in special forces: report

Tue Jan 24, 2006 8:15 AM ET
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A new Pentagon review of U.S. defense strategy would add thousands of troops skilled in fighting terrorists and insurgents to the ranks of the elite Special Operations Forces, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday.

Citing U.S. officials and military analysts familiar with the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review, or QDR, the report said the plan would increase the number of Special Operations Forces to the highest level since the Vietnam War.

The strategy also would add billions of dollars to the budget of the U.S. Special Operations Command over the next five years, the report said, citing the officials and analysts who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The newspaper said one of the largest gains would be in Army Special Forces, or Green Berets, who operate in 12-member "A-teams."

The officials and analysts were cited as saying that the Special Forces would expand from 15 to 20 active-duty battalions, creating about 90 more A-teams to deploy to regions considered vulnerable to terrorist or extremists influences, the newspaper reported.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman declined to discuss details of the review but confirmed that bolstering Special Operations Forces was "a concept the QDR has identified as important," the newspaper said.

The QDR report will be sent to the White House and Congress in February.

    Pentagon plan seeks increase in special forces: report, R, 24.1.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-01-24T131242Z_01_N23328442_RTRUKOC_0_US-ARMS-USA-MILITARY.xml

Judge Orders U.S. to Supply Prisoner Names

January 24, 2006
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

A federal judge has ordered the Pentagon to release the names and nationalities of hundreds of prisoners detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, rejecting the government's argument that it would be a violation of their privacy and expose them to retaliation by terrorist groups.

The ruling, issued yesterday by Judge Jed S. Rakoff of Federal District Court in Manhattan, came in a lawsuit brought by The Associated Press in April 2005 under the Freedom of Information Act. The suit sought to force the Pentagon to release transcripts of military tribunal hearings held to determine whether the detainees at Guantánamo had been properly categorized as "enemy combatants."

Last year, the Pentagon released the transcripts of 558 tribunals but blacked out the names and other basic identifying information about the prisoners. In his new ruling, which he described as "final," Judge Rakoff ordered the Defense Department to turn over "unredacted copies" of the transcripts to the news agency.

In August, Judge Rakoff ordered the military to ask the prisoners whether they consented to having their names published. Of 317 detainees who received a form with this question, 63 checked yes, 17 checked no, 35 returned the form without answering and 202 did not return the form, the judge said in a ruling on Jan. 4. He concluded that the small number of negative answers did not justify withholding all the names.

In his January ruling, Judge Rakoff barred the Pentagon from evoking an exemption in the Freedom of Information Act that allows information to be withheld if publishing it would be an unwarranted violation of personal privacy. He also said the Defense Department had offered only "thin and conclusory speculation" to support its claims that terrorist groups might attack the prisoners or their families.

Pentagon lawyers asked the judge to reconsider that ruling, arguing that publishing the prisoners' names would violate the privacy of their families. In his opinion yesterday, Judge Rakoff rejected that argument.

He gave the Pentagon until tomorrow to file an appeal.

The prisoners being held in the military detention camp at Guantánamo have been classified as "enemy combatants" and have not been brought before American courts.

    Judge Orders U.S. to Supply Prisoner Names, NYT, 24.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/24/politics/24gitmo.html

Pentagon Study Links Fatalities to Body Armor

January 7, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHAEL MOSS

A secret Pentagon study has found that as many as 80 percent of the marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to the upper body could have survived if they had had extra body armor. Such armor has been available since 2003, but until recently the Pentagon has largely declined to supply it to troops despite calls from the field for additional protection, according to military officials.

The ceramic plates in vests now worn by the majority of troops in Iraq cover only some of the chest and back. In at least 74 of the 93 fatal wounds that were analyzed in the Pentagon study of marines from March 2003 through June 2005, bullets and shrapnel struck the marines' shoulders, sides or areas of the torso where the plates do not reach.

Thirty-one of the deadly wounds struck the chest or back so close to the plates that simply enlarging the existing shields "would have had the potential to alter the fatal outcome," according to the study, which was obtained by The New York Times.

For the first time, the study by the military's medical examiner shows the cost in lives from inadequate armor, even as the Pentagon continues to publicly defend its protection of the troops.

Officials have said they are shipping the best armor to Iraq as quickly as possible. At the same time, they have maintained that it is impossible to shield forces from the increasingly powerful improvised explosive devices used by insurgents in Iraq. Yet the Pentagon's own study reveals the equally lethal threat of bullets.

The vulnerability of the military's body armor has been known since the start of the war, and is part of a series of problems that have surrounded the protection of American troops. Still, the Marine Corps did not begin buying additional plates to cover the sides of their troops until September, when it ordered 28,800 sets, Marine officials acknowledge.

The Army, which has the largest force in Iraq, is still deciding what to purchase, according to Army procurement officials. They said the Army was deciding among various sizes of plates to give its 130,000 soldiers, adding that they hoped to issue contracts this month.

Additional forensic studies by the Armed Forces Medical Examiner's unit that were obtained by The Times indicate that about 340 American troops have died solely from torso wounds.

Military officials said they had originally decided against using the extra plates because they were concerned they added too much weight to the vests or constricted the movement of soldiers. Marine Corps officials said the findings of the Pentagon study caused field commanders to override those concerns in the interest of greater protection.

"As the information became more prevalent and aware to everybody that in fact these were casualty sites that they needed to be worried about, then people were much more willing to accept that weight on their body," said Maj. Wendell Leimbach, a body armor specialist with Marine Corps Systems Command, the corps procurement unit.

The Pentagon has been collecting the data on wounds since the beginning of the war in March 2003 in part to determine the effectiveness of body armor. The military's medical examiner, Dr. Craig T. Mallak, told a military panel in 2003 that the information "screams to be published." But it would take nearly two years.

The Marine Corps said it asked for the data in August 2004; but it needed to pay the medical examiner $107,000 to have the data analyzed. Marine officials said financing and other delays had resulted in the study's not starting until December 2004. It finally began receiving the information by June 2005. The shortfalls in bulletproof vests are just one of the armor problems the Pentagon continues to struggle with as the war in Iraq approaches the three-year mark, The Times has found in a continuing examination of the military procurement system.

The production of a new armored truck called the Cougar, which military officials said had so far withstood every insurgent attack, has fallen three months behind schedule. The small company making the truck has been beset by a host of production and legal problems.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is still relying on another small factory in Ohio to armor all of the military's principal transport trucks, the Humvee, and it remains backlogged with orders. The factory, owned by Armor Holdings, increased production in December after reports in The Times about delays drew criticism from Congress. But the Marine Corps said it was still waiting for about 2,000 of these vehicles to replace other Humvees in Iraq that are more lightly armored, and did not expect final delivery until June.

An initiative begun by the Pentagon nearly two years ago to speed up production by having additional companies armor new Humvees remains incomplete, Army officials said.

Body armor has gone through a succession of problems in Iraq. First, there were prolonged shortages of the plates that make the vests bulletproof. Last year, the Pentagon began replacing the plates with a stronger model that is more resistant to certain insurgent attacks.

Almost from the beginning, some soldiers asked for additional protection to stop bullets from slicing through their sides. In the fall of 2003, when troops began hanging their crotch protectors under their arms, the Army's Rapid Equipping Force shipped several hundred plates to protect their sides and shoulders. Individual soldiers and units continued to buy their own sets.

The Army's former acting secretary, Les Brownlee, said in a recent interview that he was shown numerous designs for expanded body armor in 2003, and had instructed his staff to weigh their benefits against the perceived threat without losing sight of the main task: eliminating the shortages of plates for the chest and back.

Army procurement officials said that their efforts to purchase side ceramic plates had been encumbered by the Army's much larger force in Iraq compared with the Marines' and that they wanted to provide manufacturers with detailed specifications. Also, they said their plates would be made to resist the stronger insurgent attacks.

The Marine Corps said it had opted to take the older version of ceramic to speed delivery. As of early last month, officials said marines in Iraq had received 2,200 of the more than 28,000 sets of plates that are being bought at a cost of about $260 each.

Marine officials said they had supplied troops with soft shoulder protection that can repel some shrapnel, but remained concerned that ceramic shoulder plates would be too restrictive. Similarly, they said they believed that the chest and back plates were as large as they could be without unduly limiting the movement of troops.

The Times obtained the three-page Pentagon report after a military advocacy group, Soldiers for the Truth, learned of its existence. The group posted an article about the report on its Web site earlier this week. The Times delayed publication of this article for more than a week until the Pentagon confirmed the authenticity of its report. Pentagon officials declined to discuss details of the wound data, saying it would aid the enemy.

"Our preliminary research suggests that as many as 42 percent of the Marine casualties who died from isolated torso injuries could have been prevented with improved protection in the areas surrounding the plated areas of the vest," the study concludes. An additional 23 percent might have been saved with side plates that extend below the arms, while 15 percent more could have benefited from shoulder plates, the report says.

In all, 526 marines have been killed in combat in Iraq. A total of 1,706 American troops have died in combat there. The findings and other research by military pathologists suggests that an analysis of all combat deaths in Iraq, including those of Army troops, would show that 300 or more lives might have been saved with improved body armor.

Military officials and contractors said the Pentagon's procurement troubles had stemmed in part from miscalculations that underestimated the strength of the insurgency, and from years of cost-cutting that left some armoring companies on the brink of collapse as they waited for new orders.

To help defeat roadside ambushes, the military in May 2005 contracted to buy 122 Cougars whose special V-shaped hull helps deflect roadside bombs, military officials said. But the Pentagon gave the job to a small company in South Carolina, Force Protection, that had never mass-produced vehicles. Company officials said a string of blunders had pushed the completion date to this June.

A dozen prototypes shipped to Iraq have been recalled from the field to replace a failing transmission. Steel was cut to the wrong size before the truck's design drawings were perfected. Several managers have left the company.

Company officials said they had also lost time in an interservice skirmish. The Army, which is buying the bulk of the vehicles, asked for its trucks to be delivered before the Marine vehicles, and company officials said that move had upended their production process until the Army agreed to get back in line behind the Marines.

"It is what it is, and we're running as fast as we can to change it," Gordon McGilton, the company's chief executive, said in an interview at its plant in Ladson, S.C.

On July 5, two former employees brought a federal false-claims case that accuses Force Protection of falsifying records to cover up defective workmanship. They allege that the actions "compromise the immediate and long-term integrity of the vehicles and result in a deficient product," according to legal documents filed under seal in the United States District Court in Charleston and obtained by The Times.

The legal claim also accuses the company of falsifying records to deceive the military into believing the company could meet the production deadlines. The United States Attorney's office in South Carolina declined to comment on the case. The Marine Corps says the Justice Department did not notify it about the case until December.

Force Protection officials said they had not been made aware of the legal case. They acknowledged making mistakes in rushing to fill the order, but said that there were multiple systems in place to monitor the quality of the trucks, and that they were not aware of any deficiencies that would jeopardize the troops.

    Pentagon Study Links Fatalities to Body Armor, NYT, 7.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/07/politics/07armor.html?ei=5094&en=6a69abccc77d978f&hp=&ex=1136696400&adxnnl=1&partner=homepage&adxnnlx=1136613175-UUNoBPCQ6rioJRrfo056yQ

The Army, Faced With Its Limits

January 1, 2006
The New York Times
By FRED KAPLAN

ONE million men and women serve in the United States Army, so why is it proving nearly impossible to keep a mere 150,000 of them in Iraq?

The Pentagon expects to face many Iraq-type conflicts in the coming years, wars that involve battling insurgents and restoring stability. As a result, a debate is beginning to churn in defense policy circles: Should the government enlarge the military so it can more easily fight these wars? Or should the government alter its policies, so as not to fight such wars as often, at least not alone?

Senior Pentagon officials argue that neither shift is necessary, that reorganizing the Army's existing combat units into stronger, faster and more flexible brigades will have the same effect as adding more soldiers. But some analysts doubt these adjustments alone will go far enough.

Lawrence Korb, who was assistant secretary of defense for manpower and reserve affairs in the Reagan administration, states the issue baldly: "We cannot fight a long, sustained war without a larger ground force." He defines a "long war" as lasting two years or more. The Iraq war has gone on now for nearly three.

The claim may seem strange, until you peel apart the numbers. Of the Army's one million soldiers, fewer than 400,000 are combat troops (the rest are support personnel). Only about 150,000 of those combat troops are on active duty; the rest are in the National Guard and Reserves.

Then there is the matter of rotation. Combat units, at least in an all-volunteer force, cannot be deployed for much longer than a year. (To do otherwise would risk exhaustion and demoralization.) Replacements come while the battle-weary go out for rest, retraining and resupply. Therefore, to sustain one active brigade (about 3,500 troops) in a war zone, one or two additional brigades must be ready to replace it.

Finally, Iraq isn't the only foreign country where American combat troops are stationed.

In a study published in October, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office calculated that given all these factors the military could not sustain more than 123,000 troops in Iraq for much longer.

Additional forces, the budget office concluded, would require the United States to "increase the size of the land forces, terminate some other commitment or rotate forces to Iraq at more demanding rates." In the past year, the Pentagon has already stretched the rotation cycle in Iraq, for both active and reserve forces; and it has redeployed one brigade from Bosnia and another from South Korea. "There isn't much more leeway for simply moving people around," Mr. Korb said.

That leaves the other option: adding more land forces overall. How many? James Dobbins and James Quinlivan, military analysts at the RAND Corporation, have analyzed historical data on the numbers of foreign troops in various occupations after a war. They found that all the successful missions involved troop levels totaling at least 2 percent of the occupied country's population.

Taking that figure as a rough rule of thumb, securing Iraq, which has 25 million people, would require 500,000 foreign troops. American and coalition forces now total about 180,000.

Gen. Eric Shinseki, the former Army chief of staff, drew on similar historical studies when he told the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 2003, a month before the war started, that "several hundred thousand troops" would be needed to restore order after the fighting (a claim that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, at the time, vigorously disputed).

A force that large probably could have been mobilized to Iraq for some period, maybe for a year. In 2003-2004, before the insurgency got seriously under way, that may have been enough to impose order. But now, it is generally recognized that it's not possible to send any more troops from the Army as it stands.

When Representative John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat, advocated withdrawing troops from Iraq in November, he said he did so in part because senior military officers had told him the Army could not sustain even the existing troop levels.

As a way to do more with less, the Army has begun to reorganize its forces, so that each brigade has more combat troops and fewer support personnel. John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an independent clearinghouse for military information, estimates that this shift, if it's fully carried out, will let the military "sustain its current level of effort in Iraq indefinitely."

Top Pentagon officials are also seriously thinking about ways to improve the strategies for waging counterinsurgency wars. In December, Gordon England, the No. 2 official at the Defense Department, issued a directive declaring that "stability operations are a core U.S. military mission" and "should be given priority comparable to combat operations."

BUT the 11-page directive notes that carrying out the policy would require not just reshuffling but expanding the armed forces. And the Army's plan for more combat-heavy brigades requires at least keeping the same numbers of troops. Yet in the face of budgetary pressures, Mr. Rumsfeld is reportedly preparing to order cuts in military manpower.

The Army's recruitment and retention rates are declining, in any case. This has led many experts to wonder if the United States, which has relied entirely on volunteer troops since 1973, should bring back the draft.

The presidential commission that proposed ending the draft back in 1970 wrote in its report that an all-volunteer force, which it otherwise strongly endorsed, would be good only for short wars. For longer wars, the National Guard and Reserves would be called on for "the first stage in the expansion of effective forces." If war went on still longer and required more manpower, civilians would have to be brought in, if necessary, "by conscription." For this reason, the report recommended, and presidents have retained, mandatory draft registration.

Few believe Congress will reactivate the draft, short of a threat to national survival or a conflict on the order of World War II. Nor do many senior military officers want to revive conscription. They regard the all-volunteer forces as smarter, more disciplined and more skillful than the draftees of the Vietnam era.

If the Bush administration lacks the resources to meet its expansive military goals, some experts say, maybe the goals should be contracted to meet the resources.

"After the occupations of Bosnia and Kosovo, people said, 'Look how good we are at this,' " recalls Barry Posen, professor of security studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "They forget those places are small. Bosnia has four million people, Kosovo two million. It's just hard to impose your will on a larger country, unless you want to be savage about it. It's always been hard."

Professor Posen adds, "If you do need to go in and occupy some place, you should want everybody and his cousin to go in with you." This would mean a renewed emphasis on multilateralism, alliances and diplomacy - stemming not from moral qualms about the use of force, but from simple arithmetic. "Given the limits on our resources," he says, "it just seems impossible to do it any other way."

Fred Kaplan is national security columnist for Slate.

    The Army, Faced With Its Limits, NYT, 1.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/weekinreview/01kaplan.html