Secretary Of War Donald Rumsfeld

DONALD RUMSFELD COMES ALIVE IN BATTLE, WHICH MADE HIM A BRILLIANT ARCHITECT OF THE IRAQ WAR. BUT IS THE SHARP- ELBOWED FIGHTER READY FOR THE PEACE?

By Michael Duffy and Mark Thompson Monday, Dec. 29, 2003
    • WIN MCNAMEE / GETTY

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    Perhaps, but the U.S. lost four to six months in the process of deciding that its initial plan was the best one after all. A Pentagon civilian close to Rumsfeld admits, "We shouldn't have disbanded the army."

    --The Force of the Future

    In Rumsfeld's world, all that was long ago. For weeks he has been itching to get back to wrestling his real nemesis, not Saddam or Osama bin Laden but what he sees as the need to remake the military to fight villains like them for the next 25 years. Known as transformation, the initiative was the first fight he picked when he returned to Washington in 2001. At the time, he wanted to shrink the military and reduce its footprint overseas, in part by cutting the Army by two or three divisions. There was talk of killing cold war weapons just entering production and buying lethal ones instead. Rumsfeld also earmarked additional billions to build a national missile shield. Transformation was meant to prepare the U.S. fighting machine for enemies that looked less like nations and more like groups of stateless terrorists. The military first tried to stall, then fight and then outlast him. Rumsfeld reacted by dismissing the generals who didn't like his ideas and finding some who did. Resistance inside the Army was so deep that Rumsfeld brought back a retired four star, Pete Schoomaker, to be his Army chief of staff rather than promote an active-duty general--a move that still sends shudders through the service.

    But even after 9/11 changed everything, it didn't change Rumsfeld's zeal to reform or the essential outlines of his plan. Some of his ideas are very specific. He is weighing whether to move U.S. military bases out of Western Europe now that the cold war is over and shift forces east to Poland and Romania to be closer to the hot spots of the Middle East. He has asked the Navy whether its constant presence in, for example, the Mediterranean makes it harder to steam quickly to conflicts elsewhere. He wants the Air Force to think less about pilots in expensive jets and more about inexpensive unmanned drones carrying smart munitions. In a legislative tour de force in November, he pushed through Congress an overhaul of the Pentagon's civil-service rules that will allow Defense Secretaries far more leverage to hire, fire and shift people around in the military's entrenched white-collar bureaucracies. The themes of all these moves are speed, stealth and efficiency--doing more with fewer people and fewer weapons--much as they were in the two wars he just fought. "Transformation is not about things, and it's not about technology," says General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Its about how you think about things and how you change cultures."

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