Why did Rumsfeld cut troop numbers so much? Actually asking.

Boku no google

Not sure what you're talking about exactly. Rumsfeld was defense secretary (for the second time) from 2001 to 2006, and over that time the size of the army remained basically unchanged, going up from 480k to 505k, and the Marine Corps from 172k to 180k.

Rumsfeld was essentially forced to resign in 2006, as US involvement in Iraq started to grow increasingly unpopular domestically, with constant insurgent IED activity killing and wounding a few hundred soldiers a month. Morale went in the toilet, because nobody in the military having any idea what the fuck they were supposed to be doing. The generals had been telling Rumsfeld for years that he either needed to increase US troop presence in Iraq to a level sufficient to actually secure the country long-term if they were going to be staying, or pull everyone out, but they had to commit to one or the other. Recruitment numbers also started to crater because nobody wanted to sign up to get a traumatic brain injury when their Humvee got blown up, so they were implementing stop-loss policies an forcing people to extend their contracts, pissing everyone off.

Things only managed to get under control after they canned Rumsfeld in 2007 with the Surge, where they brought in another 20k troops, which was enough to stabilize the security situation.

>>64019717
Rumsfeld was basically the Republican version of McNamara. Except that, instead of running on car industry number-crunching, his decisions were based on vibes.

>>64019741

At least McNamara was mostly trying to do the right thing and win, but was hamstrung by poor data and faulty premises and a bad situation on the ground internationally and and domestically.

Rumsfeld was legitimately evil, and had zero qualms in starting needless wars and letting American troops die pointlessly (not to mention the huge number of iraqi civilian casualties) if it meant winning elections and accumulating power and wealth for him and his neocon buddies.

>>64019717

Also, the whole Iraq sideshow completely fucked up Afghanistan, and its current state can be laid squarely at the feet of Rumsfeld and the neocons. The military was actually making lots of good progress from 2001 to 2003 there in terms of rebuilding the country into something reasonably decent, and purging the Taliban influence. There was lots of international goodwill and troop commitments and a general agreement that something needed to be done about Islamic extremism due to 9/11 and several other incidents.

Then the invasion of Iraq, which was internationally extremely unpopular, completely torpedoed all that goodwill, and the rest of the world completely soured on Afghanistan as a byproduct, especially because the US pulled out most of their troops to redeploy them in Iraq.

>>64019594 (OP)
>Why did Rumsfeld cut troop numbers so much? Actually asking.
What the fuckstick did was announce that he was going to run the military "like a business" to "reduce waste". So he did things like banning cannibalization during maintenance, attempting to unify suppliers (to his cronies), pushing for airwings to consolidate on fewer bases with minimal aircraft diversity on each base (while installing his cronies in contracts for the base expansions), and generally removing all redundancy and flexibility in the logistics chain. Also pushing to cut dental and medical for dependents.
As an example, the no-cannibalization thing just led to all the combat units doing widespread and extremely blatant workarounds to keep themselves going. There was a short malicious-compliance strike that made the Pentagon hastily add a loophole for any pri-1 repairs. At which point any bird that needed canned parts got detailed as part of the next strike package, so all repairs no matter how minor suddenly became Pri-1 instead of pri-2/3. Eventually they backed off on some of the most retarded ideas after he got shitcanned.

OP here. I'm about halfway through reading picrel.
Rumsfeld and the White House conveyed to CENTCOM their desire to invade Iraq. Every single time Tommy Franks came back to Rumsfeld with a preliminary plan, Rumsfeld would throw a fit and demand that less troops be used. At one point, Rumsfeld suggested that the advancing forces wouldn't need artillery.
Was it really just a retarded "do more with less" corporate mentality.

>>64020712
Forgot picrel.

>>64019886
Not to mention Army/ Marine retention was so fucked that we ended up sending tens of thousands of Sailors out as "IA"s. Not like SEALs or Seabees or even MAs, just random cooks and electricians mates and shit doing route clearance after a 2.5 week infantry skills class

>>64019594 (OP)
Because he wanted to privatise war by giving out contracts to PMCs to do the occupation, he owned shared in the defence industry and wanted to make some money

>>64019741
>>64019769
Okay, retards.

Rumsfeld simply tried to apply corporate management practices to DoD. So, during the invasion troop numbers was cut as much as possible to make it more cost effective. He also lead efforts to privatize support roles which lead to the rise of "the defense contractor".

>Hes ebil
Midwit take.

>>64020946
Sounds like genuine incompetence to me

>>64019769
>At least McNamara was mostly trying to do the right thing and win
Is that why he had the defense attache at the US Swiss embassy deliver a list of each day’s air strike targets to the North Vietnamese embassy each evening?

McNamara was an evil dipshit uninterested in US victory too.