Donald Rumsfeld, flawed SecDef

 

Donald Rumsfeld was a strong but flawed Secretary of Defense. He asserted civilian control of the U.S. military and tried to reshape it for 21^st century warfare, only to embrace conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq that turned into forever wars.

            I started writing SecDef: the nearly impossible job of Secretary of Defense during his second tour and published it a few months before he was fired. At the time I was impressed by his performance in office. I believed in civilian control as a principle and liked his assertiveness. I believed DOD needed radical reforms and welcomed his efforts at “transformation.” I began to question his management of the war in Afghanistan and became disillusioned by his handling of the war in Iraq.

            Then I began to hear stories from my students at the National War College and read insider journalistic accounts of his conduct.

He was so determined to assert civilian control that he often demanded that military officers sit as backbenchers rather than at the main table. He told subordinates that, in interagency meetings, they could not agree to anything that had not already been decided within DOD, nor could they agree to anything else. This attitude constipated the interagency process.

Rumsfeld managed the Pentagon with “snowflakes,” short memos on major and petty topics, that forced officials into crisis response modes rather than careful deliberation. While many subordinates appreciated his demanding style and were willing to respond to his challenges, others found him abusive.

As I write in SecDef, the job has 4 major responsibilities: managing the Pentagon, advising the president and the NSC, planning wars, and serving as an important diplomat.  He did reasonably well only in that last case.

His management of DOD was flawed by his over-reliance on snowflakes. His NSC role undermined the interagency process. He criticized the National Security Council processes and meetings run by Condoleezza Rice and worked to avoid them. As the youngest Secretary of Defense, under President Gerald Ford, he fought Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on policy grounds, especially policy toward the Soviet Union. In his second tour, now the oldest SecDef, under President George W. Bush, he again fought the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, over policy, turf, politics, and governmental processes.

As a war planner, he often excluded others, including the State Department and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He nitpicked deployment plans, causing numerous disruptions. He cuts military requests for troops for Iraq in a risky effort to prove he was transforming the military. He demanded control over operations but cleverly avoided responsibility when problems arose, blaming others instead.

            He once told an audience of soldiers who complained about problems in the Iraq war, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”

Rumsfeld was the secretary of defense we had at the time, not necessarily the one we might have wanted or needed.

Here are some of the other, more critical assessments of his service. From George Packer, Spencer Ackerman, and Sarah Jones.

 

 

changed minds about politics

 

One of the indicators of how tribal America’s political parties have become is that large numbers of people say they would object if their child wanted to marry someone from the different party. In the 1960s, the figure was about 5%. Now it’s around 30%.

What’s even more troubling is that similar numbers now believe that the other party is a danger to the country. A CBS News poll last January, after the insurrection at the Capitol, found that  more than half of Republicans and more than 40 percent of Democrats tend to think of the other party as “enemies,” rather than “political opponents.”

As a Republican who converted to Democrat, I guess I have been more rational and calculating than ideological and emotional about party allegiance, but I understand how strong partisan feelings have become. And partisanship now embraces more than politics: co-partisans like the same beverages, cars, entertainment, and so forth.

But there should be limits. And some Republican members of Congress are going far beyond legitimate partisanship.

It’s one thing for an opposition party to fight the other side on everything, whether petty or significant. It’s undemocratic, however, for the opposition to reject and undermine legitimate processes and outcomes. When Congress counted the electoral votes for president, 147 Republicans voted against one of more slates, thus overruling a certified election. That’s not consistent with supporting and defending the Constitution.

I agree with the Tom Mann/Norm Ornstein analysis that the GOP moved earlier and much further to the right than Democrats have moved to the left. I also believe that Donald Trump won a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, and that the bulk of its leadership has turned it into a cult, wedded to his whims and outrages.

Some of its members are not only spreading falsehoods, but they are fomenting civil disorder. I was especially outraged by Pennsylvania congressman Scott Perry, a retired brigadier general in the Army national guard [!],calling all Democrats dangerous Nazi-like fascists.

“They are not the loyal opposition. They are the opposition to everything you love and believe in,” Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Scott Perry said of Democrats as he concluded a speech to the conservative Pennsylvania Leadership Conference on June 11. “Go fight them.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, there's a plan,” he said ominously after accusing Democrats of trying to intentionally destroy America’s economy by causing runaway inflation and oil scarcity. “They'll tell you they're patriots. But the patriots like the patriots in this room must acknowledge that things are different now. They want to destroy the country that you grew up in. They want to destroy the country that the founders made. That is their plan. That is their goal. That's why they're doing these things.”

When elected members of Congress resort to this kind of language, it does change minds. I now fear that the GOP is a real danger to the country.

the challenge of government reform

 What should be done when a government agency does a poor job on one of its key missions? Cutting funds sends a strong message but may also feed a spiral of decline. Adding money may be wasteful. Imposing more oversight and regulation may expose problems earlier, but it may also stultify its operations. Good governance is filled with trade offs and dilemmas.

The New York Times magazine has an excellent article on the Centers for Disease Control, "Can the CDC Be Fixed?" It recounts many of the missteps CDC made in responding to the pandemic, but also makes these points:

• The C.D.C. we have is hardly a monolith: Some of its many pockets are bursting with innovation; others are plagued by inertia. But scientists and administrators who have spent decades working with and for the agency say that three problems in particular affect the whole institution: a lack of funding, a lack of authority and a culture that has been warped by both. Some of these problems come down to politics, but most are a result of flaws in the agency’s very foundation.
• Today the C.D.C. is both sprawling in its reach and extremely constrained in what it can do. It consists of more than a dozen centers, institutes and offices and employs more than 11,000 people in all, in a gargantuan roster of public-health initiatives — not just infectious-disease control but also chronic-disease prevention, workplace safety, health equity and more.
• The C.D.C.’s multibillion-dollar annual budget is both too small — it has barely kept pace with inflation in the last two decades — and subject to too many restrictions. Around half of the agency’s domestic budget is funneled to the states, but only after passing through a bureaucratic thicket. There are nearly 200 separate line items in the C.D.C.’s budget. Neither the agency’s director nor any state official has the power to consolidate those line items or shift funds among them.
• The C.D.C. is resistant to change, slow to act and reluctant to innovate, according to critics. The agency’s officers are overly reliant on published studies, which take time to produce; and are incapable of making necessary judgment calls. Agency departments are also deeply siloed. “We are really good at drilling down,” Darrow says. “But terrible at looking up and reaching across.”

Sadly,  similar complaints could be made of several U.S. government agencies, including DHS and DOD. My advice is to acknowledge the conflicting pressures and try to balance between extreme remedies.

American insurgency

 

When did the people in Britain’s North American colonies see themselves as part of a separate country? I’ve just read a book [originally published in 2010] that makes a persuasive case for 1774. Northwestern history prof T. H. Breen has written a lively, people-focused story, American Insurgents, American Patriots. Cornell prof Mary Beth Norton made the same case in her book, 1774: The Long Year of Revolution, but she looked mainly at words and ideas.

Breen shows that ordinary people, far removed from turbulent Boston, felt personally impacted by the early 1774 Coercive Acts [always in America labeled the Intolerable Acts] that closed the port of Boston and put the Massachusetts government under royal control in retaliation for the tea party rampage. Civic and church groups throughout the colonies sent money and goods and even livestock to help Bostonians survive.

As early as September, 1774, when a false rumor spread that the British had bombarded Boston and destroyed much of it, thousands of men throughout the colonies mobilized to come to its defense. This made it even easier to build an army after Lexington and Concord.

Once the Continental Congress in December 1774 passed the measure calling for a boycott of British goods and organized what was called the Association, committees sprang up throughout the colonies to enforce it. These local groups, often called committees of safety or observation, were usually amazingly careful to follow due legal processes before punishing loyalists to the Crown.

I knew from earlier readings that these committees and local militias became the enforcement arms of local governments in suppressing loyalists. But I didn’t realize how little actual violence was used, or necessary. The public pressure to support the boycott and speak of the protection of liberties “for our country” was powerful even before the Declaration of Independence was adopted.

Breen blames John Adams for an 1813 comment that one-third of the colonists favored independence, another third the Crown, and another third waited on the fence to see who would win. A better assessment of the evidence is that a far larger segment of the population saw the colonies as sharing a common fate and a desire for local control of government.