Fall guy.(Donald Rumsfeld and military of United States)

THE last few weeks could be called "The Army's Revenge." There had been resentment toward Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld from the beginning over his attempts to transform the military into a lighter, more modern force. Now, a handful of retired generals have been able to draw blood with their recent calls for Rumsfeld to step aside (four of them served in the Army, the other two in the Marines).

As a political matter, Rumsfeld's leaving under this kind of fire would play as an admission that the critics who say the Iraq War was fundamentally botched have been right all along. The White House realizes this, which is one reason President Bush has so strongly supported Rumsfeld. That retired generals are criticizing a defense secretary is not, per se, a threat to civil-military relations. But there is something unseemly about it, considering that most of them apparently kept conveniently quiet about their misgivings while in uniform.

More important, the criticisms of Rumsfeld don't have much force. Some say he is too imperious. This charge isn't hard to believe of the strong-willed Rumsfeld, but it is disappointing that generals are apparently so easily cowed that their only recourse when dealing with a muscular SecDef is to whine about it after the fact. Others complain about his "micromanagement" of the war. It is true that Rumsfeld has exercised a remarkably strong hand. In planning for the initial Iraq invasion, he was relentless in challenging the work of CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks, driving him to come up with a plan that wasn't just an unimaginative repeat of Desert Storm. Even such Rumsfeld critics as Cobra II authors Michael Gordon and Gen. Bernard Trainor credit the innovation and effectiveness of the invasion.

There is no reason to think that the assumption behind the criticism of ...