By Bill Rigby
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The much heralded "transformation" of the U.S. armed forces into a streamlined, computerized, unified fighting force is dead -- or at least delayed -- leading defense analysts said this week.
Instead, the Pentagon is facing up to the much more urgent task of repairing and replacing traditional military hardware being ground down in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Military transformation has turned into a bad joke," said defense analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, who spoke at the Reuters Aerospace and Defense Summit in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday.
"Transformation was supposed to be Donald Rumsfeld's core legacy. We've spent at least $100 billion on it at this point, but a collection of poorly equipped insurgents is fighting us to a standstill in Iraq," said Thompson.
Departing defense secretary Rumsfeld launched his grand plan of military transformation early in 2001 after his appointment by President George W. Bush.
His scheme, based on existing ideas at the Pentagon, was to take advantage of a relatively peaceful period to leap a generation of military development and create a high-tech, networked force capable of heading off any conventional threat.
The highly unconventional attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, changed all that.
"The moment 9/11 happened, the assumption of a diminished threat environment was out of the window," said Thompson. "From that point on, military transformation began to lose its momentum." Continued...
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