Donald Rumsfeld: Military Mastermind

In a press conference today, Donald Rumsfeld gave his most ignorant response since the "you can put armor on a tank and still blow it up" comment. (You'd think that this guy would get the hint and stop doing press conferences, kinda like how Bush hardly ever does 'em).

He said, in response to a question of why the Pentagon isn't sending more troops to Iraq, that sending more troops "just creates more targets" for the insurgents. Hmmm. Interesting.

Well, shit, why did we send so many guys to storm the beaches at Normandy? We were just creating more targets for the Germans.

Heck, why didn't we just send one guy into Iraq? Each extra guy is just creating more targets!

Or, could the idea be, that there is a certain minimum troop strength necessary to accomplish a mission, and below that strength you simply make the guys you did send targets? Hmmm. Could it be that the reporter was asking, as was clear to any sentient beings in the room, whether the troop strength there now is sufficient to fight the insurgency effectively and thus keep the insurgents so occupied with defending themselves that they don't have time to blow up Army mess tents?

Let's consider Rumsfeld's statement on a smaller scale. You're a captain in the police. There are some bad guys hiding somewhere down a dark alley. Your best intelligence says there are five guys down there. Now, the last time you sent three guys down there, one of them got killed and you didn't get the bad guys. Do you: a) send three guys again, because sending more would just "increase the targets", or b) send like ten guys to let your guys overwhelm the bad guys and also to make it too dangerous for the bad guys to try to jump your guys?

I guess Rumsfeld would just keep sending three. And losing one each time while failing to control the threat. So, in an attempt to protect his officers by not "increasing the targets," he instead is getting guys killed while accomplishing nothing, one after another, by sending an insufficient force to deal with the problem. Only when you keep sending too few guys does the "increasing the targets" argument work. It is true that, up until you send a sufficient-sized force to accomplish the mission, adding more guys beneath that threshold is just "increasing the targets." But only an idiot fails to realize that you are, overall, going to lose a lot more guys over the long haul by continuing to send insufficient forces in, and end up killing all your guys after all without ever actually accomplishing anything.

I mean, being able to deploy your forces to maximum effect is the whole basis of warfare! Sending insufficient troop strengths to accomplish missions and being unwilling to commit forces to battle in strengths necessary to win is one of the most basic military blunders possible! Crap, Rumsfeld is like the new McClellan.

And he already started a land war in Asia, so he's actually ahead of McClellan, who at least didn't do that. Rumsfeld is like a cross between Hitler and McClellan, but with a less charming personality than Hitler and worse public relations skills than McClellan.

Sigh.