Arms and the man: the Rumsfeld vision
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent and Robert Schlesinger, Globe Staff, 4/6/2003
WASHINGTON - Three days after Pentagon enemies leaked stories accusing him of trying to run the Iraq war on the cheap, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld took to the lectern and, with his usual gleam-in-the-eye confidence, struck back.
''What we all know is the strategy is working,'' he said on Thursday. ''The coalition has secured the majority of Iraq's oil wells for the Iraqi people, secured key roads and bridges ... and has now arrived near the regime's doorstep, all in less than two weeks.''
The last phrase was the most important: Rumsfeld has prodded the military for decades to be quicker and smarter, and the battle plan for Iraq is more than just a tactical blueprint: It's the fulfillment of his vision for the balancing of troops and high-tech weapons.
Rumsfeld has nurtured them for decades, from his tenure as the nation's youngest defense secretary in 1975 and 1976, through years on advisory panels, to his return engagement as the oldest defense secretary.
At 70, Rumsfeld is a boyish figure in the Bush administration; he has eager humor and sometimes abrasive candor.
He's the most visible expression of the administration's marriage of traditional conservative nostrums: belief in the use of force and suspicion of diplomatic entanglements allied with the blue-sky thinking that seeks to remake the world with a piece of chalk and a blackboard.
Rumsfeld also can be an illustration of the administration's flaws, say some who have worked with it. He is not always a good listener. The phrase ''there's no question'' peppers his news conferences. He can seem brash and alarmingly reckless, as when he described Western Europe as plagued by old-fashioned thinking.
Those who've observed him say Rumsfeld's words always carry the force of newness. They say he is a true thinker with an entrepreneur's taste for experimentation. As a chief executive officer, he once turned around a pharmaceutical company that sold Nutrasweet and Metamucil.
Now he's promoting targeted air raids and special operations. If the war is a success, military analysts say, Rumsfeld will have the momentum to shape Pentagon planning for a generation, building more high-tech weapons and laying to rest the ''Powell Doctrine'' of massive deployment.
''The seeds of transformation have been planted in the past,'' said William Cohen of Maine, Rumsfeld's predecessor. ''It evolved over time, through Kosovo, Afghanistan, and now you're seeing it in a major way. ... The legacy of Iraq and Rumsfeld is his effort to accelerate that transformation. It's not simply technology - it's a way of thinking.''
It's a way of thinking, however, that still seems radical to many within the Pentagon. And so last week, when the Third Infantry Division paused on its way to Baghdad, dogged by guerrilla attacks, Rumsfeld's critics lit up phone lines around Washington.
The defense secretary, they said, had overruled plans calling for hundreds of thousands of additional troops. And suddenly, Rumsfeld, who had hosted a Vietnam-era predecessor, Robert S. McNamara, for a Pentagon visit the week before, was staring at McNamara's ghost in the mirror.
McNamara, too, had brought a can-do spirit from the corporate world to the Defense Department, and had become the public face of a war that turned out to lack power and last too long.
Rumsfeld, true to form, brushed aside any comparisons. Aides say he is thinking about the next step, jostling with the State Department for blueprints on a new Iraqi government.
''This is a crusader, and I mean that in the positive sense of the word,'' said Dan Goure, a former Defense Department official who served on the Bush administration's transition team. ''He doesn't take things at face value.''
Rumsfeld's childhood, covering both the Depression and World War II, was built on Midwestern conservative values. He lived in the Chicago suburbs, where his father had a real estate business. He was a straight arrow whose trajectory covered Princeton University, marriage to his college sweetheart, and three years as a Navy fighter pilot.
After a brief stint as a Capitol Hill staff member, Rumsfeld won election to Congress in 1962, at the height of Camelot. He stood out in the staid GOP caucus as a conservative who knew how to capitalize on the Kennedy style, with tousle-haired handsomeness and an ability to appear intellectual and affable at the same time.
Rumsfeld's voting record was staunchly conservative. And so, when he resigned in 1969 to become director of President Richard M. Nixon's Office of Economic Opportunity, many conservatives expected Rumsfeld to dismantle it as a Great Society relic. However, Rumsfeld warmed to his new role, and he soon found himself touting his own, streamlined versions of antipoverty programs.
He won several promotions in the Nixon White House, and became close to Nixon. He was even closer to Nixon's second vice president, Gerald R. Ford, an old ally from the House.
With some luck, Rumsfeld became ambassador to NATO, and went to Brussels in time to sit out the Watergate scandal. That left him as one of the few Nixon operatives unsullied enough to play a leading role in the Ford administration. After organizing the new administration with the help of his young deputy, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld won the job of defense secretary and, almost immediately, fell into a rivalry with the secretary of state, Henry A. Kissinger.
In retrospect, aides say, one of the most significant features of Rumsfeld's first tour at the Pentagon was his intense support for high-tech weapons, some of which are now at work in Iraq, like the Tomahawk missile and the B-2 Stealth bomber.
''He tried to reorient the military in 1975, raising pretty big questions like: `Do we need large-deck aircraft carriers?' and: Should we develop a vertical takeoff aircraft?''' said an official who knows him well.
Some of those ideas, such as the need for a plane that can take off like a helicopter, are only now coming to fruition: The V-22 aircraft is now a top priority for the Marine Corps, although the program has been plagued by testing failures and cost overruns.
In the 1970s, Rumsfeld's love of weapons seemed less creative and more strictly conservative. Kissinger had sought to win the Cold War by diplomatic manipulation, balancing world powers and interests. Rumsfeld was his skeptical opposite, asserting that the best weapon against communism was a beefed-up defense.
Kissinger wrote of the differences. Rumsfeld, he said in his memoirs, ''thwarted new diplomatic initiatives or military moves by a rigorous insistance on bureaucratic procedures and playing the devil's advocate with respect to every new proposal.''
When Jimmy Carter beat Ford in 1976, Rumsfeld disappeared from the public eye, remembered only as Kissinger's foil. But the decades that followed, running Searle Pharmaceuticals and advising presidents, were anything but stagnant. He got a bitter taste of the Middle East as President Reagan's envoy to the Lebanon war in 1983, which included a visit to then-ally Saddam Hussein. More significantly, he maintained relationships with arms contractors and stayed up to date on weapons.
He also cultivated a taste for futuristic military theories. He learned the term ''shock and awe'' from a 1996 academic paper by Harlan Ullman, a columnist specializing in national security. Ullman's article advocated using massive conventional forces to achieve the same effect as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima: to bring about a quick surrender.
''He had been heavily briefed on it; he understood it,'' Ullman said of the concept, though he added that Rumsfeld's attempt at ''shock and awe'' in the Iraq war failed because he moved too slowly.
In 1999, Rumsfeld headed a commission to assess the dangers to the US from ballistic missiles, and shocked some by warning of perils from North Korea. A week after the report was published, North Korea fired a three-stage missile over Japan, the first indication it had such technology.
Still, when Rumsfeld was appointed by George W. Bush to retake the Pentagon, neither the public nor the generals seemed to know what they were getting.
Rumsfeld's age and Cold War roots seemed to place him behind the times rather than ahead of them. This may have been appropriate for the Pentagon after the Clinton administration, when the military usually got its way.
But Bush has more credibility with the brass, and Rumsfeld began exerting more civilian control. He went to work, pushing for high-tech weapons and better-trained troops at the expense of larger divisions laden with armor. Still, many generals balked and, for a while, seemed to be raising doubts about Rumsfeld's plans.
Rumsfeld fought back with bureaucratic weapons of his own. The powerful Army chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki, was a detractor, so Rumsfeld took the unprecedented step of naming his successor 15 months before his tenure was up.
Shinseki recently returned the favor, testifying before Congress that hundreds of thousands of troops would be required to keep the peace in postwar Iraq, a figure Rumsfeld testily dismissed as ''way off the mark.''
Since Sept. 11, 2001, Rumsfeld has tried to put the winds of history at his back. With his long-held skepticism of diplomacy, he has been a force for military solutions, sometimes undermining diplomacy with off-the-cuff comments about allies and enemies alike. Inside the Pentagon, he has invoked terrorism to speed his changes.
Even if the Iraq war goes badly, no one expects Rumsfeld to crumble on his own. ''McNamara was a character from a Greek tragedy,'' said Loren Thompson, an arms-industry consultant. Rumsfeld ''simply doesn't care that people disagree with him unless it is on a subject on which he has not made up his mind.''
If the war goes well, Rumsfeld will have the momentum to shape military policy for a generation.
Rumsfeld's staff and his chosen generals, like the loyal chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard B. Myers, and the field commander, Tommy Franks, are readying plans for beefing up the post-Iraq military - making it fast and agile to fight terrorism around the globe.
When his foes in the military were criticizing his plans, Rumsfeld's allies acknowledged what had been obvious for a while: His style has alienated traditionalists in the Pentagon. But now tradition carries less weight, and, strengthened by triumphs, Rumsfeld is rushing ahead. Past the age of worrying about his career, he's relishing his chance to make a mark, with the urgency of a man who knows what it's like to be on the outside.
Said Ken Krieg, Rumsfeld's acting director of program analysis, ''He believes if we're not getting ready for the future we're not doing our jobs.''
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