the opinionist

Any and all Presidential wannabe’s can and have taken repeated potshots at the Former Secretary of Defense - Donald H Rumsfeld. He is fair game after all. His tenure in office, as the Secretary of the largest and perhaps most important government departments, was precarious from the very start.

Rumsfeld was hired by President Bush to shape the insanely inefficient and criminally wasteful Department of Defense into a leane and agile fighting force for a post Cold War world with a new set challenges and largely unknown threats.

The media predicted Rumsfeld’s demise [from a task too great] as early as August 2001. Time Magazine rang an article entitled “Defense: Rumsfeld’s Lonely, Losing Battle.”

The scale of Rumsfeld’s task: the restructuring of an organization with a 2007 annual budget of over $500 billion - almost 1.5 million active duty forces and over 700 thousand civilian employees based working in more than 600,000 individual buildings across 6,000 locations around the world!

On September 10, 2001 - one jovial day before the life-altering 9/11 - Rumsfeld stood before senior Pentagon officials - including the Joint Chiefs of Staff General [Dick] Myers - and declared war on the waste and inefficiency of the DoD.

In a meeting with a rather tedius title, “DOD Acquisition and Logistics Excellence Week Kickoff—Bureaucracy to Battlefield“, Rumsfeld confirmed a staggering statistic that had otherwise been bantered around [the internet] as an unsubstantiated rumor or bastard truth without a home.

“The technology revolution has transformed organizations across the private sector, but not ours, not fully, not yet. We are, as they say, tangled in our anchor chain. Our financial systems are decades old. According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions. We cannot share information from floor to floor in this building because it’s stored on dozens of technological systems that are inaccessible or incompatible.”

$2.3 trillion is roughly the total annual budget for the entire U.S. government - and the Pentagon has no idea how to account for this sum of money. It cannot be audited, traced or placed on a ledger. It has simply vanished.

To put this tax paying crime into some kind of perspective - $2,300,000,000,000 would pay for over 26 years of education and training for the entire nation - as based on the 2007 education budget estimates [2007 Education and Training budget is $89 billion]

Sickeningly - $2.3 trillion would ‘only’ squash some quarter of the nation’s national debt - estimated at almost $9 trillion.

Rummy recognized the scale of the problem, and in his September 10th speech he passionately described the scale of the issue.

The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America. This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating five-year plans. From a single capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans and beyond. With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk.

Perhaps this adversary sounds like the former Soviet Union, but that enemy is gone: our foes are more subtle and implacable today. You may think I’m describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world. But their day, too, is almost past, and they cannot match the strength and size of this adversary.

The adversary’s closer to home. It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy. Not the people, but the processes. Not the civilians, but the systems. Not the men and women in uniform, but the uniformity of thought and action that we too often impose on them.

In this building, despite this era of scarce resources taxed by mounting threats, money disappears into duplicative duties and bloated bureaucracy—not because of greed, but gridlock. Innovation is stifled—not by ill intent but by institutional inertia.

Just as we must transform America’s military capability to meet changing threats, we must transform the way the Department works and what it works on. We must build a Department where each of the dedicated people here can apply their immense talents to defend America, where they have the resources, information and freedom to perform.

Our challenge is to transform not just the way we deter and defend, but the way we conduct our daily business. Let’s make no mistake: The modernization of the Department of Defense is a matter of some urgency. In fact, it could be said that it’s a matter of life and death, ultimately, every American’s.

As we all know - September 11 2001 severely altered the U.S. Government and the nation. The Department of Defense moved onto a war footing and Rumsfeld’s actions from that day onwards will always be linked to the mistakes - the poor planning, miserable intelligence, awful communications and negligent decisions - of the Iraq war.

On January 29th, 2001 - the Wall Street Journal published “Rumsfeld’s Rules” - a table of ‘rules, reflections and quotations’ gleamed from Donald Rumsfeld’s tenure in public office and as an executive of a multitude of private corporations.

These were the rules that Rummy wrote and aspired to but chose to forget or ignore?

- “It is easier to get into something than to get out of it.”

- “The price of being close to the president is delivering bad news. You fail him if you don’t tell him the truth. Others won’t do it.”

- “Think ahead. Don’t let day-to-day operations drive out planning.”

- “Plan backward as well as forward. Set objectives and trace back to see how to achieve them. You may find that no path can get you there. Plan forward to see where your steps will take you, which may not be clear or intuitive.”

So Rumsfeld was hired to tackle and reform the Department of Defense. Fate delivered him a war. The criticism of Rumsfeld has barely started and history will be the fairest critique.

Yesterday - February 19 2007 - Senator and Presidential hopeful, John McCain, said of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “I think that Donald Rumsfeld will go down in history as one of the worst secretaries of defense in history.”

Associated Press (Bruce Smith) reported ‘Senator McCain complaining that Rumsfeld never put enough troops on the ground to succeed in Iraq.’

“I have been saying for 3 1/2 years that we would be in this sad situation and this critical situation we are in today,” he said.

In the world of ‘woulda coulda shoulda’ - criticism is easy and frequent. Unlike some other presidential candidates with equally lofty ambitions, at least Senator McCain was consistent in his calls for increased troop levels.

In December 2004 McCain was quoted by FoxNews as saying an additional 80,000 Army personnel and 20,000 to 30,000 more Marines would be needed to secure Iraq.

“I have strenuously argued for larger troop numbers in Iraq, including the right kind of troops — linguists, special forces, civil affairs, etc.,” said McCain, R-Ariz. “There are very strong differences of opinion between myself and Secretary Rumsfeld on that issue.”

Rumsfeld has remained quiet and appears to have retired with grace and humility. It would be all too easy to publish biting memoirs in some sad effort to salvage a degree of remedy for future historians and research fellows.

I think Donald Rumsfeld will follow this most accurate of ‘Rumsfeld Rules’ - “Don’t blame the boss. He has enough problems.”

It is a shame. Donald Rumsfeld was the right man for the DoD at the wrong time.

Posted on February 20th, 2007 under Iraq, McCain, Pentagon, Rumsfeld •  Email This Post • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback