A DIFFERENT WAR.(Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, and his management)

When General Eric K. Shinseki became the Army's thirty-fourth Chief of Staff, in June of 1999, he declared that he would transform the ponderous Cold War force that stared down the Soviets for half a century into something more useful in the disordered new millennium. He said that he wanted an Army that was nimble, light, and lethal, a force supple enough to perform peacekeeping missions or to fight an all-out war against a country like North Korea or Iraq. He said he would wean the Army from the tanks and armored fighting vehicles it loves, and replace them with systems so advanced that they couldn't be detected by the enemy, using technology not yet invented. And he wanted these changes accomplished before the end of this decade--by Army standards, nearly instantaneously.

An earlier reformist Chief, General Creighton W. Abrams, once said of the Army's native intransigence, "If I can move the Army one degree, I will have considered my tenure a success." Shinseki promised the most drastic change undertaken by an Army Chief since the late nineteen-thirties, when George C. Marshall transformed a small peacetime force into the mighty Army that won the Second World War. Shinseki expected the institution to resist his program, and it did, fiercely. Sometimes the resistance was open, and sometimes the work of opposition was left to the quiet grind of the bureaucratic wheel; there are many stories of mandates from on high getting "lost" in some resistant colonel's filing cabinet. Shinseki worried that the institution would simply wait him out--he is entering the final year of a four-year term--and then let transformation die. Still, he persisted. He believed that it had fallen to him to save the Army from irrelevance, by saving the Army from itself.

Shinseki represented a rare form of the organizational man--the consummate careerist, wholly a product of his institution, yet able to perceive the organization's flaws with an outsider's clarity. On becoming the Army's top bureaucrat, Shinseki realized that even in the epoch of American military dominance the institution was in danger of finding its place in the world severely diminished. Operationally, the Army was too big and too slow to get to a fight quickly. Politically, the low-tech, high-cost Army stood to suffer in the competition for money and favor with its more glamorous sister services operating from the sea and, especially, from the air and space.

Shinseki warned his reluctant subordinates more than once, "If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance a lot less." He worried that if the Army didn't move decisively toward change, change would be imposed by the political structure--and not on the Army's terms. With the election of George W. Bush, he was proved right.

At first, the new Bush defense team and Shinseki seemed perfectly suited. As a candidate, Bush had placed military transformation at the center of his defense platform, declaring that the Army "must be agile, lethal, readily deployable, and require a minimum of logistical support." He has repeatedly sounded those themes as President, employing almost precisely the same language that Shinseki used when he announced his transformation plans, in the fall of 1999. But the transformation advocated by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his circle is viewed by many in the Army, including Shinseki, with deep suspicion, in part because it envisions conflicts in the Information Age being fought and won mostly from the air and from space, with satellites, sensors, and precision weapons. Implicit in this thinking (though rarely expressed) is a diminished role in future wars for ground forces.

The antagonism between the Army and Rumsfeld's office has become so pronounced that some Army officers have come to refer to Rumsfeld and his team as "the enemy." The cover of the current Armed Forces Journal International features a photograph of Rumsfeld and asks, "Does he really hate the Army?"

In effect, the advent of the Bush team opened a second front with which Shinseki has had to contend. Not only does he have to persuade the Army to transform, he also has to argue for the Army's utility in war. At the heart of this argument is the belief that no technological wizardry can eliminate the risks of close combat, and that even the new, unconventional conflicts that loom will ultimately hinge on the skill, commitment, and courage of the American soldier.