Military leadership shakeup continues

The turnover in America's top military ranks continues, with the announcement by Defense Secretary Robert Gates that Army Gen. George Casey, former commander of all coalition forces in Iraq, will replace departing Army Chief Gen. Peter Schoomaker.

"There is no officer at this time better suited to be Army chief of staff," Gates said Friday as he announced Casey's new position.

Schoomaker's retirement was expected; he is nearing the end of a three-year term. Military insiders say the announcement of Casey as his replacement should be read as Gates' attempt to repair the troubled relationship between the Army and the Pentagon's civilian leadership under the abrasive former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld came into the Pentagon determined to remake a military he viewed as little changed from the Cold War era. He aimed his wrecking ball squarely at the Army, which he saw as the biggest dinosaur among the services. Within months, Rumsfeld axed two of the Army's biggest weapons programs -- the Crusader artillery piece and Comanche helicopter -- and tried to cut the active Army down to eight divisions from the existing 10.

There was also the well-publicized fallout with then-Army Chief Gen. Eric Shinseki, who successfully staved off Rumsfeld's attempt to reduce the Army's end strength, but raised Rumsfeld's ire by stating publicly, prior to the Iraq war, that occupying Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of troops. Rumsfeld promptly dispatched his own advisers to the talk shows to counter Shinseki's claim.

When Rumsfeld announced Shinseki's replacement, more than a year before it was due to take effect, much of the Army leadership took it as an unforgivable slight.

"It was a very Rumsfeld kind of thing to bring in Schoomaker to replace Shinseki like he did," said Daniel Goure, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. Instead of selecting from a long list of three- and four-star generals, Rumsfeld brought Schoomaker out of retirement to lead the Army. Schoomaker also came from a special operations background, a career track very different from that of traditional Army leaders, who typically rise through the ranks commanding large tank and infantry units.

Schoomaker was seen as a maverick, very much in the Rumsfeld mold, and shared Rumsfeld's vision of a lighter, more agile military and small teams of commandos playing the lead role in the global war against diffuse terrorist networks, Goure said.

The Army chief's most lasting legacy is likely to be his push to convert the service's principal organizational formation from the large, ponderous division, made up of nearly 20,000 soldiers, to smaller brigades of around 3,500 soldiers.

Schoomaker intended the new "modular" brigades to have a standard formation, so they could more easily replace similar units in distant war zones by falling in on the previous unit's equipment. This would greatly reduce transportation time and cost. He also lobbied Congress heavily for more money to make up for what he described as "a $56 billion equipment shortfall thanks to the procurement holiday of the 1990s."

While Schoomaker may have been a Rumsfeld man, he constantly warned that the Army, overstretched in fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was in danger of becoming a "hollow" force, worn down by repeated combat deployments, personnel shortfalls and war-damaged equipment. "Casey was brought up in the system," Goure said, and his selection as Army chief will do much to signal to the service that the Pentagon is returning to its more traditional bureaucratic functioning. Casey's experience commanding troops in Iraq may serve the Army well, as it is in the midst of a significant transition from a force designed to fight fast paced armor battles on the plains of Europe to one aimed more at waging irregular warfare against small guerrilla groups hidden among civilians in urban areas.

But while he likely will be a tremendous asset to an Army trying to reshape itself for 21st century warfare, his legacy as commander in Iraq remains uncertain, Goure said. Casey was long an advocate of a smaller footprint for American troops, and pushed to get Americans off Baghdad's streets, to be replaced by Iraq's own security forces.

But the quality and numbers of Iraqi personnel never caught up to the requirements of Casey's strategy, and when he prematurely pulled American troops off Baghdad's streets in early 2006, the levels of violence in the city skyrocketed.