Was Rumsfelds insistence on lighter, more flexible military with fewer troops vindicated by the victory?
In purely tactical terms, Rumsfeld’s insistence on a lighter force was probably vindicated by the Iraq campaign. It worked pretty much the way they hoped it would work. Even when it didn’t work the way they wanted it to, they had the flexibility to make it keep working in a different way. There’s no doubt that Rumsfeld interpreted that as a big success. The looting breaks out. There’s massive outbreak of lawlessness. What happened? The problem for the Americans was that, after the fall of the statue, after the fall of Saddam, there was no order in Baghdad, and they didn’t have enough troops on the ground to enforce order. They didn’t have enough civil affairs officers. They didn’t have enough military policemen. The 4th Infantry was still making its way up from Kuwait. So if Rumsfeld’s vision of the war plan was a tactical success, some generals in the Pentagon began to worry if it mightn’t have been a strategic failure, because the American forces did not have the capacity to enforce
