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Introduction: Breaking Down

I just can’t imagine someone looking at the United States armed forces today and suggesting that they are close to breaking.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 20061

On September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stood in front of the assembled great and good of the Pentagon and delivered an expansive lecture entitled Bureaucracy to Battlefield.2 Its prescriptions were extremely radical—among the most portentous in US military history—but thanks to the terrorist atrocities the following day his words remain buried deep in the memory hole, while their consequences are buried under the sands of Iraq and Afghanistan. “The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America,” Rumsfeld began, before revealing the threat to be not Al-Qaeda, but the “Pentagon bureaucracy.” “Not the people, but the processes,” he added reassuringly. “Not the civilians, but the systems. Not the men and women in uniform, but the uniformity of thought and action that we too often impose on them.” In essence, Rumsfeld’s speech that day was designed to lay the ground and soften up his workers for a massive privatization of the Department of Defense’s services. It was the realization of a long-held dream for Republican politicians and their corporate allies in Washington—who would now be presented with a sweet shop full of lucrative government contracts to chew on. With the tragic events of the next day and the ensuing two-front ground war in the Middle East, Rumsfeld was gifted the perfect opportunity to enact his program with minimal opposition. The results were clear eight years into the War on Terror when the DOD (Department of Defense) had 95,461 private contractors working for them in Iraq compared to 95,900 US military personnel.3 The use of private contractors was by then so embedded that Barack Obama’s initial skepticism about their use displayed while a senator became one more item in a long list of policy climbdowns. But while the privatization of the war effort is a topic that has been explored extensively by a number of journalists, notably Jeremy Scahill,4 one aspect of the program has received little coverage—namely Rumsfeld’s plan for soldiers on the payroll of the DOD. Equally radical, it was a scheme that would prove catastrophic for the troops and the occupied populations living under them. Veiled in the language of business-style efficiency savings, Rumsfeld’s plan was intended to eviscerate the US military, which was to become merely an appendage to the massive private forces the US would employ in the future.

“In this period of limited funds,” he continued, “we need every nickel, every good idea, every innovation, every effort to help modernize and transform the US military.”

This could only be done by changing the basics of how the Pentagon worked, in a process that would later be dubbed “Transformation”: “Many of the skills we most require are also in high demand in the private sector, as all of you know. To compete, we need to bring the Department of Defense the human resources practices that have already transformed the private sector.” Even the DOD itself was to be run like a corporation: “We must employ the tools of modern business. More flexible compensation packages, modern recruiting techniques and better training.” What Rumsfeld desired was a scaled-down, streamlined US military—a reversal of what had become known as the Powell Doctrine, named for the Desert Storm general Colin Powell, who believed in high troop numbers, “overwhelming force,” and a defined exit strategy. It was a risky approach for Rumsfeld to take. Even before 9/11, Powell, by now Secretary of State, had observed that “our armed forces are stretched rather thin, and there is a limit to how many of these deployments we can sustain.”5 That would prove to be an understatement. But Rumsfeld was backed in his new approach by his boss, President George W. Bush, who much to Powell’s consternation shared the same vision. “Building tomorrow’s force is not going to be easy. Changing the direction of our military is like changing the course of a mighty ship,” Bush said in May 2001.6

The oft-repeated cliché is that everything changed on September 11, and indeed it did for millions of Americans. But not for Rumsfeld: his priorities stayed the same while his popularity surged after he was pictured helping victims of the attack at the Pentagon into ambulances. He now had not only the ultimate cover for changing the course of the mighty ship and designing a pared-down business-style war machine, but also the perfect laboratory for his experiments. The war drums began beating in earnest soon after 9/11. The invasion of Afghanistan began with a Rumsfeld-inspired Special Forces mission to bribe local warlords, supported by airstrikes obviating the need for “overwhelming” manpower. But the so-called neoconservatives weren’t finished yet: they had their eyes on the ultimate prize of Iraq and, sure enough, eighteen months later and much more controversially, the country with the third-largest reserves of oil in the world was attacked—a move Rumsfeld’s deputy Paul Wolfowitz had been advocating (again, with a Rumsfeld-style small force) in the 1990s. Over the next decade, US bombs fell on Syria and Pakistan and Yemen, among others, as the Middle East turned into a conflagration of Dantesque proportions, with civilians, insurgents, and US service members all caught up in the blaze.

Rumsfeld’s guinea pigs for his new experiment in “flexible” military planning were the patriotic Americans who believed they were signing up to defend their country—at the height of the War on Terror, 1.6 million of them had served in the Middle East.7 That number, equivalent to the population of a country like Estonia or a city like Philadelphia, must have come as a surprise to Rumsfeld, who had predicated his whole war plan on a much smaller force and a short war. In fact, soon after 9/11, General Tommy Franks had been asked by Rumsfeld to estimate how many troops an invasion of Iraq would require. The last contingency plan for invading Iraq, dating from 1998, had recommended a force of more than 380,000. But, apparently under pressure from Rumsfeld, General Franks presented his “Generated Start” plan with an initial troop count of just 275,000.8 Even that was too much for Rumsfeld, who in typical peremptory fashion slapped down the general and pushed for an even smaller force. According to Michael Gordon, military correspondent for the New York Times, “They came up with a variant called the running start, where you begin maybe with a division or so, and then the reinforcements would flow behind it. So, you start small but you just keep sending more of what you need.”9 This approach generated what was called a “war within a war,” as it pitted Rumsfeld against General Eric Shinseki, the army’s popular Chief of Staff, and Secretary of State Powell, both of whom (rightly) believed that large numbers of troops would be needed to ensure security after the initial fighting was over. General Shinseki publicly proposed a force of 200,000, after his frustration with Rumsfeld’s intransigence on the issue became insufferable.10 It didn’t matter. Rumsfeld wouldn’t listen.

This tactic was so blinded by ideology that it directly contradicted the ostensible goals of the invasion—disarming Saddam Hussein. “The United States did not have nearly enough troops to secure the hundreds of suspected WMD sites that had supposedly been identified in Iraq or to secure the nation’s long, porous borders,” said Michael Gordon and General Bernard Trainor in their book Cobra II. “Had the Iraqis possessed WMD and terrorist groups been prevalent in Iraq as the Bush administration so loudly asserted, [the limited number of] U.S. forces might well have failed to prevent the WMD from being spirited out of the country and falling into the hands of the dark forces the administration had declared war against.”11 But it wasn’t just ideology that was to blame for the ensuing damage to the US military and its war aims; there was a sizeable dose of incompetence as well. Declassified war-planning documents from the US Central Command in August 2002 show how ill-prepared the Bush administration was for the occupation which was to follow. The plan they put together assumed that by December 2006 the US military would be almost completely drawn down from Iraq, leaving a residual force of just 5,000 troops.12 It was madness, but nevertheless music to Rumsfeld’s ears.

After much wrangling, Rumsfeld and Franks compromised and the initial force numbered 130,000, much smaller than had been envisioned in the 1990s, but not as slim as Rumsfeld had hoped. It didn’t go to plan anyway, and the troop levels were not enough to get a handle on this country of 30 million people. Incrementally more service members were sent out alongside private contractors as the situation descended into chaos after the first viceroy Paul Bremner’s decommissioning of the police and military sparked endless violence. By 2005, the US had 150,000 troops deployed in Iraq, and 19,500 in Afghanistan. But the war plan meant the military wasn’t prepared in any way for this kind of extended deployment—and it was unraveling. In 2005, just two years into the war in Iraq, people were talking openly about the fact that the US military had reached breaking point. At a Senate hearing in March of that year, General Richard A. Cody expressed these concerns publicly: “What keeps me awake at night is what will this all-volunteer force look like in 2007.”13 But he didn’t know the half of it. Worse was to come as in the same year the army missed its recruitment targets by the largest margin since 1979, a time when US society was still afflicted with so-called “Vietnam Syndrome” and the army was much bigger and recruiting twice as many soldiers.

Breaking Point

Around this time a retired army officer named Andrew F. Krepinevich, writing under a Pentagon contract, released a shocking report which was scathing about the US military being able to maintain its troop levels in Iraq without breaking the military or losing the war. His diagnosis was simple: the US armed forces were “confronted with a protracted deployment against irregular forces waging insurgencies,” but the ground forces required to provide stability and security in Afghanistan and Iraq “clearly exceed those available for the mission.”14 To compensate, the army was introducing change by the back door at the expense of their troops. Krepinevich pointed to the frequent and untimely redeployment of service members. “Soldiers and brigades are being deployed more frequently, and for longer periods, than what the Army believes is appropriate in order to attract and retain the number of soldiers necessary to maintain the size and quality of the force asking.”15 He offered three solutions for overcoming the desperate shortage of troops: redeploy existing troops more frequently still; redeploy them for even longer; or deploy US Marine ground troops. The first two of these prescriptions had already been undertaken by the army, but it was a dangerous game. “How often can a soldier be put in harm’s way and still desire to remain in the Army?” Krepinevich asked. “It is not clear, even to Army leaders, how long this practice can be sustained without inducing recruitment and retention problems.”16 His conclusions were not optimistic: the army, he said, was “in a race against time,” in which “its ability to execute long-term initiatives” was compromised by the “risk [of] ‘breaking’ the force in the form of a catastrophic decline in recruitment and retention.”17 He continued that it would be difficult not to stress the active and reserve components “so severely that recruiting and retention problems become so severe as to threaten the effectiveness of the force.”18 By now, then, everyone—including even Rumsfeld himself—knew the army had to increase in size. “With today’s demands placing such a high strain on our service members, it becomes more crucial than ever that we work to alleviate their burden,” said Representative Ike Skelton (D-MO), who had a long track record of advocating for a bigger army.19 But with recruitment down and anger at the war widespread how could this be done?

There was one course of action that would have instantly sewn up the military’s unraveling seams, namely: the draft. But it was too controversial. Involuntary conscription had been abolished by Congress in 1973 at the end of the Vietnam War. At the time Krepinevich was writing, it did enter into the national conversation, although the Bush administration remained implacably opposed for reasons of naked self-interest. When Rumsfeld testified at a Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee in April 2005 the issue was raised by Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI). “For the first time in many years the Army and Marine Corps are not meeting their recruiting targets. There are some who are already discussing the draft,” he said with diplomatic tact. An exasperated Rumsfeld shuffled forward in his seat and put his mouth closer to the microphone: “I think the only people who could conceivably be talking about a draft are people who are speaking from pinnacles of near-perfect ignorance,” he replied. “The last thing we need is a draft. We just don’t.”20

The Democrats kept pushing until Charles Rangel, a Congressman from New York, reintroduced the Draft Bill in February 2006, which if passed would have reinstated conscription for all those up to forty-two years old. “Every day that the military option is on the table, as declared by the president in his State of the Union address, in Iran, North Korea, and Syria, reinstatement of the military draft is an option that must also be considered, whether we like it or not,” said Rangel. “If the military is already having trouble getting the recruits they need, what can we do to fill the ranks if the war spreads from Iraq to other countries? We may have no other choice but a draft.”21 It was rejected by Congress, much to the delight of President Bush. “I applaud the House of Representatives for soundly rejecting the ‘Reinstate the Draft’ bill,” he said in the aftermath. “If this bill were presented to me, I would veto it. America’s all-volunteer military is the best in the world, and reinstating the draft would be bad policy. We have increased pay and benefits to ensure that our troops have the resources they need to fight and win the war on terror. I want every American to understand that, as long as I am President, there will be no draft.”22 Reinstating it wouldn’t have made the US an anomaly among its allies: many still run compulsory conscription programs, including Israel and (until 2011) Germany. The draft also has deep roots in the US historical narrative: during the Civil War, America’s greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, had put forward the Conscription Act which called for the military service of all healthy males between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five for a three-year term. But the opposition from President Bush and his administration should be understood from the perspective of the still-raw memories many Americans have of the last draft. In a war so unpopular and with a president under so much pressure, the administration was aware that conscripting the nation’s youth into the military could well be the straw that broke the camel’s back. In a 2006 CBS poll, 68 percent of respondents said they opposed re­instating the military draft.23

The Vietnam-era draft has also come under concerted attack ever since that war because of its targeted recruitment of certain demographics in the American population. Roughly 80 percent of the soldiers sent to Indochina were from working-class and/or ethnic minority backgrounds.24 One Vietnam veteran, Mike Clodfelter, who grew up in Plainville, Kansas, wrote in his 1976 memoir: “From my own small home town . . . all but two of a dozen high school buddies would eventually serve in Vietnam and all were of working class families, while I knew of not a single middle class son of the town’s businessmen, lawyers, doctors, or ranchers from my high school graduating class who experienced the Armageddon of our generation.”25 Even though the draft was never reinstated during the War on Terror, there were symmetries with recruitment trends from the Vietnam era. In the War on Terror, the US military again focused on enlisting society’s poorest. Denied the draft, however, it fell back on another method learned from attempts to swell the ranks during Vietnam: changing the regulations on enlistment. In 1965, as the troop buildup in South Vietnam grew, the military started to abandon its standards for recruitment and hundreds of thousands of men who scored among the lowest IQ percentiles were admitted for the first time. “Prior to American escalation in Vietnam such men were routinely rejected, but with a war on these ‘new standards’ were suddenly declared fit to fight. Rejection rates plummeted,” writes one historian.26 In 1966, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara instituted a program called “Project 100,000,” which aimed to increase the levels of troops by that number within two years by admitting civilians who had previously not met the required standards.27

The New Look

Without conscription and with recruitment targets being consistently missed, the Bush administration and the Pentagon devised a similar plan. By subcontracting out myriad operational tasks to private military institutions like Blackwater and DynCorp, who received billions of dollars in government largesse to man the frontlines in the War on Terror, the government had partially dealt with the gap between its demand for cannon fodder and the supply of quality troops. A thin coalition of countries, later including NATO troops in Afghanistan and the UN in Iraq, helped ameliorate the chronic troop deficits. But it wasn’t enough. In 2004, Bush took another unusual step to plug the hole: he called up 37,000 members of the National Guard to go to fight in the deserts of Iraq.28 Not since the Korean War had there been such a mobilization: the National Guard had served in the Gulf War and Kosovo, but in nowhere near such huge numbers. By June 2005, they accounted for 45 percent of the total army in Iraq.29 Then there were the monetary inducements, which became quite lucrative for service members and crippling for the Pentagon. The Rand Corporation conducted an in-depth study which found that the DOD budget for enlistment and reenlistment bonuses had skyrocketed between 2000 to 2008, more than doubling to $1.4 billion for reenlistment bonuses. The average army enlistment bonus increased from $5,600 to about $18,000 per soldier over the same period.30 In just three years, from 2006 to 2009, the army dispensed with $1 billion to recruit 64,526 active-duty and reserve soldiers. Army Reserve recruits saw their bonuses more than double over the same period, to $19,500. But the study also found that in the army recruiters themselves tend to be a more cost-effective way to swell the ranks of the military than enlistment bonuses or pay increases. The Bush administration took that route too. To achieve its 2007 goals, the army increased its 8,000-strong recruiting force with 2,000 new assistants.31

At the same time—and perhaps most importantly—those who should have been kicked out were being allowed to stay. In June 2005, the Wall Street Journal turned up an internal memo to senior commanders which called the growing dropout rate—called “attrition” in military jargon—“a matter of great concern.” “We need your concerted effort to reverse the negative trend,” it read. “By reducing attrition 1%, we can save up to 3,000 initial-term soldiers. That’s 3,000 more soldiers in our formations.” It was an explicit call to drop standards: the message being that soldiers addicted to alcohol and drugs, those who lose their fitness, or their mental poise, shouldn’t be discharged. It was batten down the hatches time. The Wall Street Journal quoted a battalion commander as saying: “It is the guys on weight control . . . school no-shows, drug users, etc., who eat up my time and cause my hair to grey prematurely . . . Often they have more than one of these issues simultaneously.”32 Such sentiments did not occur in a vacuum. Rumsfeld and the Pentagon were, in fact, allowing the dismantling of the whole regulatory structure for enlistment and retention that the US armed forces had built up in the twenty-five years since Vietnam. The slim military needed fattening up and this was the only way to do it. In the end it constituted a complete re-evaluation of who was qualified to serve in the US armed forces, a full-works facelift of the service unheard of in the annals of modern American history. In the relatively halcyon days of the First Gulf War in 1990, the US military blocked the enlistment of felons. It spurned men and women with low IQs or those without a high school diploma. It would either block the enlistment of or kick out neo-Nazis and gang members. It would treat or discharge alcoholics, drug abusers, and the mentally ill. It would pass up the services of foreign citizens to fight its wars. No more. While the Bush administration adopted conservative policies pretty much universally, it saved its ration of liberalism for the US military, where it scrapped all the previously sacrosanct regulations governing recruitment to the most powerful fighting force in the world. Under the aegis of the War on Terror, the US armed forces became a Mecca for the “different,” the weird and wonderful (and dangerous) of America.

Throughout all this, however, the military maintained a rictus, everything-in-order, smile for the public. As late as August 2007, when the crisis befalling the institution had become widely known, Michael Dominguez, Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, began his testimony to a Congressional hearing with a slap on the back for the US military: “Let me begin by acknowledging an historic achievement that many, including some of our own experts, would have thought impossible a few years ago,” he said. “We have taken an all-volunteer military to war. We have done it in a strong economy with 4.5 percent unemployment. We often have asked that force and their families to do more on short notice. And through it all, we have manned this nation’s military with people far above average relative to their peers.”33 It was simply untrue. The average member of the US military was no longer far above their average peer. The following chapters will show how the Bush administration, together with a pliant Pentagon (and the succeeding Obama administration), enabled the US military to undergo the biggest and fastest transformation in its history. Each chapter will cover a different group of people who have been enfranchised through the War on Terror as the US military scrambled for troops. The different weightings and amount of reporting on each group reflects the fact that some of these changes in regulation have been explicit (for example, rules on body weight and IQ) while others have been completely denied (from neo-Nazis to gang members). Still others have been hushed up as far as possible—such as the vast numbers of young Americans scarred for life by mental illness, left untreated and forsaken.

It will become clear quite quickly that it is not just American soldiers who have been short-changed by Rumsfeld’s vision—the occupied populations have been sacrificed with rivers of their own blood. Many of the wars’ worst atrocities are linked directly to the loosening of enlistment regulations on criminals, racist extremists, and gang members, among others. Then there is the domestic US population, which has had to put up with military-trained gang members marauding around their cities; as well as Mexican civilians who have paid with their lives in the drug wars facilitated in part by the US military. The effects of this will be felt for decades to come. Finally, there’s the safety of the troops themselves. Loosening standards on intelligence and body weight, for example, compromised the military’s operational readiness and undoubtedly endangered the lives of American and allied troops. Hundreds of young Americans may have paid with their lives for this folly.

US society changed profoundly after the September 11 attacks and during the subsequent wars. In many ways, the military is a reflection of the society from which it is drawn, and the changes in the composition of the US military and its regulations over this period reflected a country in political, cultural, and economic reverse gear. As America became increasingly bigoted and inward-looking, so radicalism in the US military increased. As young people became ever fatter, so too did the soldiers. As the criminal justice system locked more and more people up, so the military had to increase the numbers of felons it allowed in. “Today’s young men and women are more overweight . . . and are being charged for offenses that in earlier years wouldn’t have been considered a serious offense, and might not have resulted in charges in the first place,” an army spokesman complained in 2008.34 At the height of the War on Terror, only one in three men in the general population met the pre-9/11 physical, mental, educational, and other eligibility requirements needed to enlist in the armed forces. “The numbers of people who meet our enlistment standards is astonishingly low,” grumbled Under Secretary Dominguez at the end of his testimony lauding the military’s success.35 To enlist the rest, the US military had to change in profound and dangerous ways.

What follows, then, is a soldier’s-eye history of the War on Terror, told by the men and women who have often paid the highest price (alongside, of course, the occupied populations). Through it all, the military rationalized its transformation program as an altruistic democratization of the fighting force or denied outright they had loosened regulations. “In the 1990s what you saw was they just kept raising the standards for who they would accept, as a way of weeding out less desirable people, it was a buyer’s market,” John Pike, a military analyst, told me. “When the war came along they decided that a lot of these standards didn’t have anything to do with war fighting.”36 It was a lie, as this book will reveal in its attempt to remedy the relentless propaganda.