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This is the story of how Don Rumsfeld tried and has so far failed to conquer the Pentagon--the story of a man who played by the rules of a bygone age, when power in Washington was less diffuse, when the military brass were more subservient and when options could be hammered out in a place that barely exists anymore--in secret. It's the story of how Washington has changed in the 24 years since Rumsfeld left the capital for the private sector. After his announcement last Friday, Rumsfeld denied that he had executed an abrupt about-face. He insisted he had never committed to force reductions in the first place. But he admitted, in an interview with TIME, that he was "surprised" by how much Washington has changed since 1976. After leaving town "I was not into the rhythm of the place," he said, and the changes in the intervening years took him by storm. "My Lord, in this place, all you have to do is think about something, and it is leaked. It's like there are eavesdropping microphones on your brain." It's enough to make a man devise some new rules for coping. Here are a few that Rumsfeld might want to adopt.
New Rule No. 1 Times change. So do the Rules.
During the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had a simple message for their audiences, particularly those in military towns: "Help is on the way." To most men and women in uniform, that meant more money was on the way. But after Bush and Cheney took over last winter and installed Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, the new team shocked hard-liners in Washington by proposing little new money for the military this year. Instead, Rumsfeld announced that he was conducting a "top-down" review of the Pentagon's strategy and forces, with an eye toward transforming the hidebound institution and getting it ready for the wars of the future. Help would have to wait.
Rumsfeld's review was a good idea, everyone agreed, because the Pentagon was still spending about the same amount in the post-cold war world as it had when the Soviet Union was a threat. With the big old enemy gone, it made sense to re-examine how America trains and equips itself to fight. Besides, the huge budget surpluses that were being forecast seemed to make genuine reform a possibility for the first time in decades. "There was reason to do the review even if the cold war hadn't ended, but it had," says Lawrence Korb, a Reagan-era Pentagon official now at the Council on Foreign Relations. Korb notes that the Joint Chiefs were behind the idea. After eight years of Clinton, he said, they "were dying to have these guys back."
New Rule No. 2 Ask the locals for help. It's impolite--and quite possibly dangerous--not to.
If the review was overdue, the way Rumsfeld went about doing it was downright peculiar. Instead of using active-duty officers to run the show, he at first went outside to retirees for advice. That upset both officers and civilian employees, who were much more up to speed about current threats and capabilities. Rumsfeld also kept top officials of the services in the dark about his progress--and many, like Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, complained that it took months just to get a meeting with Rumsfeld. It wasn't long before the Pentagon bureaucracy went from pliant to resistant. "People got mad," said F. Whitten Peters, Secretary of the Air Force under Clinton, "because they didn't feel it was a real two-way street."