(3 of 5)
Rumsfeld had reasons for his secrecy. When push came to shove, the military didn't much want to re-examine itself. When he asked for recommendations about how to change, the Navy came in with a request for five additional aircraft carriers. The Air Force offered to mothball some old bombers but would not sacrifice a single fighter plane. The Army proposed to cut the Reserves--an idea it knew Congress would never approve. But there was something else going on. Throughout the campaign, the Bush team kept complaining about burdensome overseas commitments. The military, however, regarded all the extra work as exhausting but also as a useful lever during budget negotiations. The more the services thought about Rumsfeld's "transformation," the less they cared for it. As an admiral said last week, "Like it or not, the current strategy resonates with most people here. It's better to be engaged overseas than to have to die [in combat]. We like that. When we're engaged, we know the turf and we know the allies. Pulling out takes all that away."
New Rule No. 3 Don't charge up the Hill alone.
With the military brass suspicious of him, Rumsfeld then did something truly strange. He kept his potential allies on Capitol Hill--Republicans and Democrats alike--completely in the dark about his plans. Senators from shipbuilding states could not find out if their beloved destroyers and frigates would be axed. Members of Congress with divisions stationed in their backyards kept hearing rumors about deactivation but could not confirm them. There were new leaks every day about dismantling National Guard units and mothballing ships. And when the lawmakers managed to corner him, Rumsfeld gave nothing away. "He made everybody mad," says Dicks. "He'd listen to what you had to say, but there was no dialogue."
Behind the scenes, Rumsfeld was making some progress. By late July, he had yoked the Joint Chiefs together and won their O.K. to abandon a cornerstone of U.S. defense strategy--the ability to fight two simultaneous wars. For a decade, that strategy had helped justify the large force structure left over from the cold war. Once Rumsfeld got the generals to abandon it, he could pressure the services to downsize and refashion their forces in support of a more realistic strategy--such as winning one war decisively while deploying peacekeeping troops in perhaps half a dozen other places. "He really locked them in," says a Rumsfeld aide. "He got them to agree that the world had changed."
But by then, a lot of other things were changing too. As summer arrived, as the economy kept sputtering and Congress enacted a $1.35 trillion tax cut, those rosy surplus projections began to shrink. Military health-care costs rose faster than missile-defense bills. The budget situation became almost impossible. For months, many analysts had been saying the only way Congress might go along with Rumsfeld's reforms was if he sweetened the deal by sprinkling goodies on key districts. But now the extra money was drying up. Rumsfeld went to the White House in July to ask for $38 billion more for next year's military budget, and he came away with less than half that. It was the largest increase since Reagan, but it wasn't enough to grease the way for Rumsfeld's reforms.
New Rule No. 4 Don't assume your subordinates are on your side. They probably aren't.