t he p erils of o ptimism 287targeted air power. Rumsfeld went so far as to entertain the possibility
of mounting the invasion with less than a single division of American
troops, fewer than 17,000 all told. Whether he actually believed the
scheme possible or merely used it to whittle down the troop com-
mitment in Franks’s plan is open to question, but it had the desired
eff ect. CENTCOM produced successive iterations of an invasion plan
that would be executed by about 100,000 American and allied (pri-
marily British) troops.
In asserting fi rm political oversight in the planning process, Rums-
feld exercised the kind of active direction that Cohen recommends,
with a twist. Cohen advocates hands-on control by the political leader.
Bush, though, introduced his own management style, one based on his
business background: he believed a leader ought to set the general
direction and tone for his organization and let trusted subordinates
execute his vision within their particular domains. Th us he delegated
full responsibility for planning the Iraq invasion to others, particu-
larly his defense secretary. Rumsfeld and General Franks presented
the successive versions of the plan to the president and his principals
(the heads of major agencies and the national security advisor). At
no time did Bush engage in a searching critique of the plan or
explore the assumptions behind it. From the beginning of the
planning process to the outset of the invasion, the entire enterprise
was Rumsfeld’s show. He intended it as defi nitive proof of his ideas
about military transformation. ^
Certainly there was unease in military circles about the invasion plan
that emerged. It presumed a swift advance to Baghdad, so rapid that
the Iraqis would be unable to organize a coherent defense. But the
attacking forces would depend upon a long, vulnerable supply line that
would stretch some 300 miles. With so few troops on the ground, the
enemy might easily ambush lightly guarded supply columns. Better to
have a larger margin of safety, many military planners believed, by
increasing the size of the invasion force. Th ere was also the matter of
securing all the suspected WMD sites—an unreliable list of more than
900 had been developed by American intelligence agencies. To permit
unguarded WMD to fall into the hands of extremists would defeat a
main purpose of the war, yet there simply were too few troops for both
the thrust to the Iraqi capital and protection of WMD sites.